


The Witch in the Wood

by LittleIvy



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Betrayal, Dark, Dark Magic, Dialogue Light, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Forbidden Love, Healing, Hopeful Ending, Horcruxes, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Infidelity, Kidnapping, Knight Draco, Lovers To Enemies, Miscarriage, Misogyny, Near Death, Non-Explicit Sex, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Hermione Granger, Pregnancy, Princess Hermione, Rape/Non-con Elements, Soft Draco Malfoy, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Werewolves, bed sharing, fairytale AU, fic based on art, ooc draco
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:35:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 20,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28093998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleIvy/pseuds/LittleIvy
Summary: Trapped in a loveless marriage to Lord Voldemort and forced to beget him an heir, it won't be long before Hermione withdraws into herself, sinking so deep not even a Legilimens spelunking in the hollows of her mind will be able to find her. Engaging in a forbidden romance with her bodyguard keeps her afloat, but secret affairs in the Dark Lord's court never stay secret for long. Someone must know of their treason—why else would Lord Voldemort send him, of all people, to hunt her down once she escapes?
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy, Hermione Granger/Voldemort
Comments: 63
Kudos: 148





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was inspired by the gorgeous fairytale art by Avendell. Go check them out on [Tumblr](https://avendell.tumblr.com/) and [Insta](https://www.instagram.com/avendellart/?hl=en)!
> 
> Some other inspiration...  
> \- Lancelot x Guinevere (hence the fic title shamelessly stolen from T.H. White)  
> \- stylistically, Margaret Atwood  
> \- the character of Ophelia from Shakespeare's Hamlet
> 
> I am open to any and all constructive criticism and feedback. Hope you enjoy!
> 
> P.S. This gorgeous header was made by ShellyShelby! Thank you so much xx  
> 

Bleeding feet, ragged breaths, the tiny, barely-there seed of magic dwindling in her breast. Drumbeats on the winter earth, rolling through the dark trees like thunder. Closer, closer.

She’s weak. He’s going to catch her.

Brambles snatch at her hair and tear her dress to tatters. Without her magic to coax the roots, they reach for her. She hits the ground. It’s hard and cold, frosty against her cheek.

_ The Horcrux.  _

It’s still in her satchel; the sharp points of the diadem press through the fabric, pricking her fingers.

_ Get up. Keep running. _

She can’t. Sharp pain splinters through her sternum; every dribble of magic expended to keep herself conscious brings her closer to burnout. The cold should have killed her hours ago.

A boulder, rising from the mist. What better place to make her last stand? 

Rough, cold stone on her palms. Dragging herself upright. Hot blood in rivulets on her cheek, rolling down her neck. Her head is bleeding.

He’s here. She can feel it. His presence is electric, raising the hairs on her arms, dripping ice into her empty stomach. The stink of his horse precedes him then he’s there, emerging from the murky dark. Moonlight ripples across the black metal of his helm. 

Magic sears through her, white-hot and blinding, dragged from the near-empty pool deep inside. She doesn’t see so much as feel him careen from his horse, tumbling into the brush, her bolt of magic turning him over and over, battering him, allowing her to flee.

There’s nothing left. The place where her magic is supposed to be, nestled deep, thrumming with life, is bare. Stripped to the aching bone. Exposed nerves scream, begging, pleading,  _ no more. _

Yet, she runs.

_ I can’t go back there. I won’t. _

Frigidness on her legs. Her dress, torn at the knees. Blood. Coarse wood scuffing her palms. She’s leaning against a tree, her breath rattling in her throat.

He’s still alive. The feel of him crackles across her bare skin, rousing gooseflesh on her arms, a sickness in her stomach.

Clanking metal. Far off, crying night birds. A wolf howls.

Stumbling steps, a little farther into the forest. Another tree to support her weight, rest her cheek against the bark, hold on to wakefulness with bleeding fists.

An icy band clamps around her throat. Scrabbling fingers—she knows this metal. Where there was an empty well, there is nothing. Iced over. No hole to fill.

Her magic, snuffed.

Turning, slowly, but her head keeps spinning. She sways. 

"Draco?"

It's him. The black armour gleams. 

"I'm sorry, Hermione."

Bright pain her temple, then the void.

Mother told her she was beautiful. 

It’s why he picked you, dear. All those pretty girls of much higher birth and he picked you. You’ve made us proud.

The carriage came the next morning, black, green, silver, and fearsome, drawn by Thestrals. Mother and father looked so, so small, ebbing into the horizon.

They disappear in her memory. It’s dark. Nightjars churr in the undergrowth, the sound jittering along her bones, rattling in her skull. 

_ Open your eyes. _

Rising from the black is like treading mud, rotten and thick and clinging. Perilous work, picking through the recesses of her mind, worming towards the light.

Hooves thud, synchronous with the warm flesh shifting and swaying beneath her. Each pinch, each warble of hurt undulating between her frayed nerves, hitches her into alertness.

Coarse rope scratches the sensitive skin of her inner wrist, scraping over the veins. The metal collar at her throat is freezing cold.

An owl broods over its own sonorous voice, distantly, deep in the heart of the woods. The air is delicate with pine and decay. Branches flutter across her cheeks, chafing the wounds. She hisses sharp, cold air through her teeth.

“You’re awake.”

The horse plods on. Familiar trees and rocks slide by.

“Don’t make me go back.” She cranes to look at him but finds only dispassionate black metal where his face should be. “Please.”

Severe ridges of armour dig into the tenderness that is her back. Dark spots coil in her vision, twisted around at such a sharp angle. She faces the front.

“The Dark Lord is eager to have you returned. If you come quietly, you won’t be punished. He’ll forgive everything.”

_ Lies.  _ He’ll kill her, like he did the ones before.

Silver seeps through the foliage, hazy and indistinct, a half moon’s light. It’s as cold on her exposed skin as the horse beneath her is warm. 

They ride for hours.

Draco lifts her down, the remains of her shredded dress susurrating against his armour, echoing in the branches like a hissed reproach from the wind and the leaves. It’s dawn; the light is grey and watery.

The cold doesn’t numb her, just makes the aching in her legs a keening wail. She staggers after him, drunk on exhaustion. His back is turned, head bowed.

“Look at me.”

He doesn’t turn. Her bones creak; she’s an ancient ship, rocking on its moorings. Hands bound, she tugs his shoulder.  _ Look at me.  _ Immovable, a metal monolith. He turns of his own accord.

“Why you?” Her throat constricts, pulse beating furiously against the metal collar. “Why did he send you?”

“You know why.”

“You should have run.” Tears, hot on her cheeks. She imagines the steam rising from them. “The opportunity won’t come again.”

“I don’t want it to.”

Something tiny but intrinsic cracks. She beats his breastplate, fragile bones grinding, skin smarting. “You should have run!” 

Pounding heartbeats, ringing metal. She doesn’t make a dent. Skittering pain in her arms when he seizes her wrists and holds them still.

Ripped from her like that last drop of magic, a broken, ugly sob. “Don’t make me go back.”  _ It hurts, it hurts, oh, Godric, it hurts. _ This pain is bone-deep, excruciating, her bodily wounds mere chafing in comparison. “Do I mean nothing to you?”

He squeezes her wrists; another painful jolt, she flinches. He releases her like stinging nettle. His voice, muffled and guttural behind the helm. “You betrayed me. You left. Don’t you remember?”

She remembers.

He was her black shadow. What other colours a shadow might be, she didn’t know. A wedding gift for my dear bride, Lord Voldemort said. 

His midnight plate armour swallowed the sconce-light whole, like a snake. No—a dragon. The little ridges on the back of his helmet looked like dragonhide.

She asked him about it—custom-made armour was a rich man’s gambit and she was curious—but he didn’t respond.

He didn’t say anything at all, this bodyguard of hers. Even in full armour, he barely made a sound. If he weren’t so big, she might forget he was there.

She was trapped.

Glimpses of the outside shuttered past, framed by granite arches, each pillar a gilded cage bar, or stone shackle perhaps, although she was theoretically free to roam the castle as she pleased. A flock of Thestrals wheeled above the trees, skeletal bodies harsh against the pale grey sky.

She wondered if he could see Thestrals; the wickedly sharp sword at his side said yes, he had brought death many a time and watched it overcome his victims. Relished it, even. There was no sheath, just gleaming, marbled steel, hanging at his hip from leather loops. Dark magic rose from the metal in curling wafts of brimstone.

She asked him about that, too. 

Strange, for a Muggle to wield a magical artefact. And he was a Muggle—magical folk had a certain feel to them, all frenetic energy and serrated edges, millipedes clicking between the gaps in the air. He felt smooth and calm, a mirrored sphere. She couldn’t peer beneath the surface.

A set of huge, heavy oak doors. Handles wrought in the shape of snakes with bared fangs and lashing tails. The library.

She reached for the handle but her bodyguard barred the way.

“Let me pass.” Lifting her chin did nothing to make her any taller or him any less gargantuan. A giant beetle, shining carapace, very sharp pincers. Too big to crush underfoot.

He didn't move. She knew he wouldn't—he was Lord Voldemort's creature, assigned to watch her as much as protect—but the knowledge didn't make it sting any less. She had no power here.

Heat gushed down her arms, seeping from her fingertips, burning her dress. She scrunched the fabric tight and slammed a stopper on the overflowing pool in her chest. Burning silk stung her nose.

He could smell it, too. Silver glowed in the recesses of his helm, glinting through the gap of the visor. 

_ I could kill him.  _ Desiccate his organs with a thought, will the blood to calcify, stone in his veins, toppling him, he falls and shatters, a million shards, she's free.

A reckless, dangerous fantasy. He was not the only Death Eater in this castle. Dozens—more—all with magic-imbued swords she didn't know the strength of. One cut, would it turn her to dust?

They wouldn’t dare. She was too valuable to Lord Voldemort for them to harm her.

That was what she told herself.

Clicking footsteps in the corridor, loud and insistent and purposeful. She turned away from the library, heavy skirts dragging along the stone; it was winter, and her wardrobe was filled with wool, velvet, and brocade. Layers upon layers of petticoats. Her dress, a prison unto itself.

A woman rounded the corner. Hermione clasped her hands inside her wide sleeves, breathed in, pressed her loathing deep beneath the surface. Bellatrix Lestrange. The Dark Lord’s mistress.

Her bodyguard angled himself between them.

A scream of laughter, raucous and raspy like a crow’s call. “Sweet nephew! If I wanted her harmed, would she not be already?”

Bellatrix wanted her dead. Hermione had felt that black intent rolling off of her throughout the wedding ceremony, seeping into the very stone, staining the air, a sour miasma. But Bellatrix was barren, and Lord Voldemort wanted an heir.

Black armour blocked her view, but Hermione felt when Bellatrix opened the door to the library. Dark, pulsating, intoxicating, pulling a thread deep in her chest.  _ Come to me come to me come to me.  _ Bellatrix ducked down to stare at Hermione through the triangle of space between her bodyguard’s arm and torso. She bared her teeth in a vicious smirk, fluttered her fingers, turned her back on the doors, still slightly ajar. A glimpse of towering bookshelves, that same power oscillating through the crack. The doors slammed shut and Hermione felt a keen emptiness where the magic had been.

Her shadow followed her everywhere. Through the castle, out into the gardens, down to the Black Lake when winter turned to spring; stood in the corner while she took her meals, waited outside her door, night after night, still there when the dawn came. Did he ever sleep?

Hermione wondered if he heard her softly crying on the nights when she had to lie with Lord Voldemort to beget him an heir.

She walked through the springtime gardens. It was warm, sunny; summer was on its way, even though the breeze was fresh and cool. In her wicker basket, there were flowers—sweet peas and tulips, perfect for the crystal vases in her room—and her discarded gloves. Gloves, in case she lost her temper and burned another dress. Her decision. She took them off to snap the flower stems with her thumbnail, sticky sap on her fingers.

Happiness was foreign to her. This lightness in her chest could not be considered joy or cheerfulness; she searched for a word and settled on contentment. Peaceful, wandering between the flowerbeds, pretending her bodyguard wasn’t a few steps behind. It was easy to do—he was completely silent, and far enough away that his shadow didn’t reach her.

Was this what her life had been reduced to? Picking flowers, eating alone, laying on her back and staring at the ceiling, drifting out of her own body, crushed from above, cold breaths on her neck? She wasn’t even allowed to practice magic beyond the basic tasks of closing a door or heating her bathwater.

You have a duty, her mother would say. Do your family proud.

She was trying.

_ Try harder. _

A rose bush, wilting petals peeling away from the core, stems drooping, cloying perfume tickling her nostrils. She crouched, skirts pooling in the grass. Petals, soft as velvet against her fingertips; so sad, to be reminded of one’s infinite transience. A brush of her thumb and the rose bloomed with renewed vitality.

An ebon gauntlet fell atop her hands.

“She’s watching.”

Emotionless black metal, the barest sliver of eyes through the visor. Human—not a walking statue, after all. Young, she realised with a jolt. It was the first she had ever heard him speak.

She cast a wide net, arcane tendrils poking and prodding through the garden. It was like walking through a dark room; feeling the brush of objects and knowing their shape without truly seeing them. Broad hedges, fountains, the edges hard and granular, flowerbeds in a concentric pattern around a large pond lined with willow trees. There. On a balcony, a patch of insidious, poisonous darkness.

For a moment, she considered unspooling the magic in her chest, letting it tumble out and turn the gardens into a wilderness, just to see what Bellatrix would do.  _ Do it.  _ She didn’t. The rose bush wasted away: dull, fetid, grey, tired, like the husk of a mutilated building.  _ Coward. _

She waited until the darkness receded, signalling Bellatrix had returned inside. Humming in the air, bees bumping into flowers, bird calls, and there, so soft she couldn’t be sure it was real, breathing from deep within the black helm.

He had spoken to her. At last.

Kneeling, he towered above her. His armour shone, a splotch of ink against the verdant garden; this close, she saw it wasn’t entirely black, but shot through with minuscule veins of silver. Beautiful. But how could he stand the heat? Dark green fabric draped over his shoulders, embroidered with a silver crest: a lavish M edged with serpents, dragons, and acanthus leaves.

Malfoy.  _ Bad faith. _

She looked away, down at his sabatons. “Thank you.”

No response.  _ Please, talk to me.  _ Speaking used to be such a simple act, but now she felt her vocal cords shortening, going taut from lack of use.

That was how they wanted her: beautiful, gormless, mute.

She had her own bathroom, right beside the bedchamber. Three small windows peered out at the Black Lake, glassless, letting in the air and out the steam. A copper bathtub on lion’s paws dominated the centre of the room. She revelled in letting magic course through her veins and heat the water to a near-boil.

Scalding, that was how she took her baths. Skin sloughing off, lustrous bones, soupy red bathwater, bobbing organs. She stepped in, feet tingling, pleasant tremors up her body as she sank down. A long, low sigh. Let her float like this forever, returned to the safety of the womb.

The knock came too soon. When she didn’t answer, her handmaids entered anyway; three of them, girls her age, carrying combs and pitchers and long, slender bottles of oil.

This was the worst part, almost worse than what came after. Naked and vulnerable, they scrubbed her down, every inch of her, behind her ears and between her toes. Then they combed oil through her hair with their fingers, let it rest, unpicked the tangles with three different combs. Patted her dry, dripped perfume on her breasts, her stomach, between her legs.

She arrived at the jet-black doors of Lord Voldemort’s chambers trussed in her finest silks, hair still slightly damp. Her bodyguard—Malfoy, she now considered him—walked with her so far as the entrance. She would go in alone, as she always did.

One day, she would withdraw so far within herself, sink so deep, not even a Legilimens spelunking in the hollows of her mind would be able to find her. She hoped for and feared it in equal measure.

Doors closing behind her, Malfoy’s silhouette melting away. Before they swung closed and her nightly fate was sealed, she felt it. A ripple on the surface of the mirrored sphere. There and gone, a fleeting chink in the armour.

The bolt slid home, and he was gone.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first part of this chapter was originally posted on Tumblr in response to Avendell's [Carry](https://avendell.tumblr.com/post/636132509695049728/carry) artwork. As always, I welcome any and all feedback, constructive criticism, and comments. Thank you for reading!

She liked to practice her spellwork in the quiet, pre-dawn light when she wasn’t likely to be disturbed. Her jewellery box floated past her face, carried on a drift of magic; she called it hers, her jewellery, her clothes, her possessions, but she should really say Lord Voldemort’s, for everything in the room belonged to him. The dress she arrived in had been burned, leaving her with nothing to call her own save for her magic and her skin. The latter could not even be considered her own any more.

There was a huge four-poster bed, with sage green sheets, and a stuffed chair in the corner. An indoor flower bed—amaryllis, violets, hibiscus, primrose—and a writing desk, black ink and expensive vellum. There was a thick woollen rug which her bare feet sunk into, and a large fireplace she could light with the barest thought. A balcony with glass doors looked out over the Forbidden Forest.

It was nice. Comfortable. Her bedroom at home had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a plush pillow at the foot of her bed for Crookshanks. No books here, in case she got any grandiose ideas.

Crookshanks. A hard bolt, right through her stomach. She had begged and begged and begged to bring him with her, but Father had refused.

You are to be a Lady, he said. Lord Voldemort wants a woman, not a little girl clinging to her pet. The cat stays here.

She missed Crookshanks more than her parents, sometimes. Soft fur, rhythmic purring rumbling up her arms, cuddled close, a thunderstorm rattling the window panes. She summoned Crookshanks now, not the real him, he was all the way across the forest, but a sheer reflection of his shape as it existed in her memory. Brilliant yellow eyes, glowing, twin lamps in the milky, dusty light.

She tried to pet him and her hand went right through. A hitch in her breathing. Swelling in her throat, billowing out, out. Croaking, face contorted, a deep ache in her stomach.

_ Don’t. Don’t.  _ She told herself this wouldn’t happen, that she would sink within herself as into a deep lake, water hugging her close, spiralling, a stone to the bottom. This feeling wrenched her to the surface and dangled her on the end of a hook. Squirming, thrashing, anticipating the bite.

Crookshanks evaporated, leaving her alone. Utterly alone. 

She imploded. A star, collapsing in on itself, all that power locked away in her core flaming up, exploding, decimating everything. The windows shattered, her room—Lord Voldemort’s room—reduced to shreds of sage green fabric, crumbled stone, torn vellum.

Her, in the heart of it, trembling.  _ Make it stop.  _ It was difficult to grip something as insubstantial as smoke. Magic pulsed from her, rupturing the tiles, ignoring her efforts to stuff it back inside.

She didn’t realise she was on the floor until Malfoy tore into the room and he was sideways. Clatter, a dropped sword, he staggered against the thumping power whipping his cloak about his head. Arms around her, under her knees, a hand on her back. Movement, out of the wreckage. Breaths under the helmet. She curled into him as the tears came, her gaoler and protector, and found comfort in the cold metal against her cheek.

“This sedative,” said a high, sibilant voice, slithering through the crack in the door. “Will it affect the magic of any future heirs?”

An unfamiliar room. Scratchy white sheets, one window, high up on the wall, enough to let in light but not to see out of. They gave her bitter tea to drink and something else that made her eyes droop.

She wanted to cry but had no tears left. No, they were there, but out of reach, under the water when she was an oil slick, sliding around on top. Probing in her chest cavity, feeling for her magic, was like trying to dress in the dark—she knew the textures and the shapes but nothing would align correctly. The most she could manage was a stirring of the dustmotes above her bed.

“Your heirs will inherit both magical lines even if Her Ladyship continues consuming the tea, My Lord, but I would advise against a collar at this time.”

“Very well. Inform me should anything change.”

Retreating footsteps. A creak, the healer standing at her bedside, feeling her forehead with clammy fingers. His breath on her face was stale and dry, old rag mats and week-old bread. She tried to hate him but couldn’t find the strength to do anything other than lift her head and swallow the bitter tea.

“The fatigue will fade after a little while.” He closed his bag. Tiny bottles lined the outside pouch, glass sentinels with funny cork hats. “Try to get up and move around. I’ll be back to see you tomorrow.”

He was. And the day after that, and the day after that, and the day after that stretching on  _ ad infinitum _ . At least, it felt infinite. The days slid by, growing warmer when suddenly, they stopped.

Nothing was different about this particular day. She walked down to the Black Lake, Malfoy a few steps behind, his shadow on her back, carrying her things. She swam in the lake and returned to shore, walked up to the castle, waited in her room for the healer and the tea, wet hair stretching down her back. The healer watched her drink every drop then turned to the window—she was in a different room, now, large but empty, a picturesque view of the gardens her only decoration. The glint of dusk light on the little bottles irritated her eyes. 

His back was to her. She plucked one of the bottles like a sunflower seed and hid it away in her wide sleeve. He picked up his bag and didn’t notice the infinitesimal difference in weight. Why would he? The door clicked shut behind him and she was left with this stoppered hope, the feel of her free will cool and solid beneath her fingers.

She could drink it and be asleep before her body hit the ground. Feel nothing as a shard of glass, or broken mirror, sliced through the ropey veins inside her wrist. Dreamless, unceasing sleep. Or she could hold it close to her chest, this knowledge that she controlled her own destiny and nothing, not the tea nor the healer nor Lord Voldemort, could stop her if she decided to escape.

She felt very unreal, sitting there on the bed. Untethered. She went to sleep with the bottle under her pillow like a talisman and dreamed of flying, over the mountains and away, away, away.

Two weeks later, the healer left the door open. She checked the bottle was securely in her sleeve before getting up. Magic, even the flyspeck needed to close a door, was too much for her. She’d woken after trying to summon flowers for her room with a sharp ache in her head and Malfoy leaning over her, cleaning the blood with a cloth, her pale oval of a face reflected in his helmet.

He hadn’t called the healer; she hadn’t said a word.

They had an unspoken arrangement. She didn’t try to speak to him, ask about his family or his armour or what he did when he wasn’t guarding her, and he let her have as much privacy as his duty would allow.

Her handmaids complained he kept them waiting for far too long on bath days, that they wouldn’t have enough time for her hair if he kept scrutinising them so closely. Shouldn’t he recognise them by now? Hermione relished those stolen minutes, alone in the bath, scented steam engulfing her.

She closed the door but it stopped, a black gauntlet flat against the wood. Her heart rose in her throat. This was highly irregular. What did he want?  _ The bottle _ ; he knew, he must, tasked as he was with protecting her, even—especially—from herself.

She stood behind the door, breathing too fast, fingers trembling. Caught her reflection in the mirror—saw herself wispy, agitated, carefully combed and dressed, but pursed, weary around the eyes, with a hunched back she corrected by a spasmodic lengthening of the neck: a debilitated woman, feeble, defeated, burned out. 

Waiting, waiting, until her breaths were even again. The hinges whined and there he was, sucking up the light. She kept one hand behind her back, fist clenched so tight she would leave angry red crescents on her palms.

No cloak. Only the armour; biting edges, severe chines, like always. In his hand, a book.  _ The Tales of Beedle the Bard.  _ She plunged headfirst into her childhood, sitting on her father’s knee, a sprawling garden, Mother crocheting, untarnished springtime glory. Then she grew up.

He pressed the book into her hand. She imagined bringing it to her face and kissing the spine, soft as skin beneath her lips, but he was watching. So unfamiliar, the feel of leather and the mellow, old-paper scent. How long had it been since she held a book in her hands, caressed the pages and burned the candle down low?

She hugged the book, smiling. This, too, was unfamiliar. Her cheeks bunched and a curious bubbling filled her stomach. If she hadn’t drunk the tea mere minutes ago, she might have thought it was her magic returning.

The smile faded. For a moment they simply gazed at one another. Thank you needn’t be said. He wouldn’t respond, and she wouldn’t expect him to. She often thought she had imagined his voice, all those weeks ago. A bout of delirium borne from loneliness.

A step forward and she would be close enough to lay a hand on his breastplate, the shape of a breath on her cheek, smooth metal slipping a chilly bite beneath her sleeve. Glinting silver, just out of reach. A step. Just one. Simple, so simple, yet her feet were rooted. 

Torchlight wavered around them, vague shadows on the walls.

The rest of him did not move, but his hands, slowly, pulled off his gauntlets. Black gloves. Black and silver, and dark green, occasionally. Vernal. A warm spring breeze after the bitter cold.

He closed the space—must have, to be so near; she tilted her chin—but she could not remember him moving. Gliding, impossibly fluid. A spectre. She wondered if he was horribly disfigured under the glossy black helm. Would she care if he was?

Warmth on her cheek, his gloved hand, thumb skating under her eye to wipe a tear. Tears? She was crying, at last. Her chest tightened then released, ribcage unlocking, lungs swelling. She breathed. Wetness on her skin, brushed away, deliberate tenderness.

Not a moment had passed with her face turned into his hand when, abruptly, he was gone. Gauntlets fastened, a statue again. Had she imagined it? Her skin tingled, pink and glowing.

They stood there, staring, suspended over a yawning abyss, like pirates with rope necklaces; like hopeless rebels, fools. She backed away and closed the door.

Thumping on the window. No, in the walls. The castle’s beating heart, enveloping her. She couldn’t sleep. Something tugged on the thread in her chest. It was buried so deep, drowning in bitter tea, she almost didn’t feel it.

Almost, but not quite. Its insistence interrupted her reading. She slipped from bed and out into the corridor.

No shadow following her tonight. She thought, idly, it was because of the new moon. There couldn’t be a shadow if there wasn’t first light.

Even blind, her feet knew where to go. She found herself outside the library, hand wrapped around a silver snake’s head. Ice-cold to the touch but thrumming, somehow alive. She tugged but it wouldn’t give.

“What are you doing, little dove?”

She froze: caught, she was caught. 

Lord Voldemort’s hand was cold on the back of her neck, pinching, like grabbing a pup. “Ah,” a slow exhale, ruffling her hair. “My Horcrux, it calls to you. To my son, quickening in your womb.”

_ No.  _ Her hand flew to her stomach; flat, empty, she thought. Illness squeezed her entrails, forcing them up into her throat. She would know. She would know if she were… 

She wasn’t. How could he know?

“Oh, yes.” He squeezed, forcing her face towards him. “I can feel him. A mere seed at the nonce, but growing. He will be strong, like his sire.”

Stinging bile in her mouth. She wrenched herself away, gasping.

“Run along to bed, dear. You will need your rest.” He snapped his fingers and Malfoy manifested from the pools of dark at the edges of the corridor. 

There, all along. Listening, watching, a passive suit of armour.

The bottle burned a hole beneath her pillow that night.

A mother’s mercy, that was what she would call it. Staring at the ceiling, into the Stygian darkness, she conceived her plan.

Summer had come, hot as sin, scorching through her flimsy linen dress. A bathing gown, her handmaids called it. No more swimming naked in the midsummer rivers of her girlhood. 

Malfoy held a parasol above her delicate paper skin. Incongruous with the ice in her veins, this heat. Gelid lake water nibbling away at her flesh would be a welcome reprieve.

Cool water on her ankles, over her knees, fabric clinging to her thighs, her back, the lake embracing her, clothes spread wide, and mermaid-like. The bottle, hidden in her sleeve. She floated on her back and brought it to her lips, swallowed the contents, let the little glass sentinel bob away, duty done. Malfoy was a tiny, shining beetle on the distant shore. All that armour, he would sink. No use to anybody.

She relied on it.

Above, far above, spider webs of sunlight. There were mirrors down there in the lake, dangerous glittering, her own warped reflection. She breathed—that was perilous. She thought, which was more so.

_ I want to live. _

Live? This wasn't a life. Her life had been stolen, sold to Lord Voldemort, fenced; illicit goods. 

Water in her lungs, then fire. Searing, smoke in her throat, burning her sinuses. Oh, Godric, she hadn't expected it to hurt. She had imagined sweet sleep, the lake taking her gracefully, a beautiful corpse in white on the dark stones, artfully waterlogged. 

For what good was a woman if she couldn't be winsome, always, even in death? 

Laughter boiled inside her like magma. The lake entered through her open mouth, consuming and consumed. Cold, wet fingers twisted in her windpipe. 

Any moment now. 

She spasmed, clawing towards the distant sunlight. 

_ I want to live. _

Eyelids fluttering. She gasped but there was no air.

_ I want to live _

Lake weed tangling in her dress, clinging to her ankles, dragging her to muddy death.

_ I want to _

Surging, something else in the water. Out of the black, a flash of white and silver. Hands on her waist, falling upwards, falling, falling, fracturing the surface.

_ I want _

Jaggedness against her back, her arms. A mouth on hers. Life breathed into her. Water, coughed up and spit out, curled on her side, wheezing, shaking with mirth.

_ Alive, I’m alive. _

Her throat hurt but she couldn’t stop laughing. Alive, alive, alive, said her thundering pulse.

The sleeping draught rose up to claim her at last, wreathing her head in a dense, valerian-tinged fog. Through the vapour, a face, hovering above her own, all hard angles and pale lines. Saying her name, but the dark halls of sleep had already swallowed her up.

“Why?”

He knelt by her bedside. Young; he was younger than she had anticipated, and not horribly disfigured after all, but symmetrical and comely. Still wet, his white-blond hair stuck to his forehead.

“Why would you do that?”

Golden light trickled through the dirty windows, drifting over the narrow bed, the chest of drawers, skimming over the hollow where a fireplace had once been, but now was empty. A scar on the wall. 

Tendrils of foggy sleep lingered in her mind. On the bedside table, a bundle of herbs sat softly smoking. She wiped an arm across her face and found the skin damp; she mustn’t have slept for very long. 

“Dried dittany.” He stubbed the bouquet against the wood, leaving a charred circle. “I needed to wake you.”

“You should have let me drown.”

Malfoy ran a hand through his hair, gripped it in a fist, lake water dribbling onto the floorboards. Floorboards, dark wood; not the castle, then, which was all stone and marble and long, lonely corridors. A cottage, she guessed.

“You must promise you won’t do anything like that again. Make the Unbreakable Vow, or else I’ll tell His Lordship.”

She huffed a laugh; it rasped along her bruised throat and burned inside her nostrils. “Gladly,” she croaked. A thick swallow, tears pricking her eyes. “To break an Unbreakable Vow means imminent death. My will triumphs, either way.”

His eyes flashed. Such pale eyes—she’d never seen anyone with that shade of grey, so bright and fierce so as to be silver. He rolled up his sleeve. 

No armour. The shock of it finally registered. No armour, but still he dwarfed her. 

He brought a blade down on his forearm, decisively, a good, long gash on the first slice. Her stomach turned and she sat bolt upright.  _ What in Godric’s name… _

“A blood pact, then.” He flipped the knife and held it out to her, handle first. “If the Dark Lord discovers what happened today, you’ll lose a lot more than your magic. You don’t require arms nor legs to give birth.”

A chill spider-walked down her spine. His eyes were sagacious, two silver reflecting pools, not a ripple on the surface. If she looked for long enough, she might fall in. 

The handle was smooth and warm in her palm. “Why not tell him, then? Having an immobile charge will make your life much easier.”

Blood rolled down his arm and dripped to the floor. Drip, drip, drip—the only sound punctuating the silence stretching thin between them. His eyes never left her face.

She took the knife and made a shallow cut on her arm. Pain bloomed, hot and bright. They clasped elbows, wounds pressed, latent bloodborne magic weaving together, sealing. Sealed. Her entire body tingled.

She pulled away and clamped her hand over the cut. “It’s done. What is this place?”

For a moment she saw only the top of his head; he reached into the bottom drawer for a roll of bandages and a small metal tin. His fingers were long and pale, surprisingly feminine and delicate despite the flecked scars and callouses. Watching them move in all their nakedness made her pulse quicken. She looked away, cheeks heating.

They were only hands. She was bathed by hands that were not her own, touched, skin to skin, yet to see him without armour was somehow more intimate. He moved in the corner of her eye, drawing her arm into her lap and daubing a fragrant salve over the wound. Every touch sent ripples racing to her shoulder and up the back of her neck.

“This is the gamekeeper’s cabin,” he said at last. He wrapped her forearm and tucked the end of the bandage in to keep it secure. “He’s… no longer with us.”

Myriad meanings lingered behind his words, though she knew he would never elaborate. Perhaps the gamekeeper absconded to join with the Order of the Phoenix, or was relieved of his post.

Or perhaps he was simply dead.

She moved to bandage his arm next but he pulled out of reach. “That won’t be necessary, My Lady.”

“You’re bleeding.” She stood up and found she was only at his shoulder. “Please. It's the least I could do.”

But the reticence had returned and she was met in answer with his back to her face. He began pulling on his armour.

It shouldn’t have stabbed her so, this dismissal. She rubbed at her chest, finding the skin raw and sensitive, the beating heart encased there fragile behind the brittle bones. Wetness in the corners of her eyes, blinked hurriedly away. She shouldn’t, she shouldn’t, but who else was there left to hurt her, if not for him?

So many buckles and laces but, as she watched, they knotted together independently—magic, like his sword. He fastened it on his hip and stood facing her, helmet under his arm.

His lips parted, a short inhalation, words which were not yet words but on the cusp, shivering in the space between them. Then he pulled his cloak from a hook on the wall and drew his helmet over his face. A veil, blocking the light from his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There were two lines from Shakespeare's Hamlet in the drowning scene... can you spot them?


	3. Chapter 3

Wordlessly, they returned to the castle. Wordless; without words, but that was not quite true. They existed, scuttling within the coils of her mind, slipping between the cracks; a sieve, that was what her mind had become. Soft and full of holes, weak, with nothing to stimulate it. She used to know plenty of words: somnolence, jaspideous, dealate; an insect divested of its wings.

The castle’s shadow leached warmth from the air, summer breezes dashing themselves to pieces on the heartless stone. She hugged herself, feeling, finally, the icy sting of the lake in her damp hair, on her skin. A heavy, dark green cloak fell around her shoulders, smelling of meadowsweet and something else, deep and familiar, like the woods she explored as a girl, a tree stump already fresh with new life, a scent she could smell on her tongue.

Malfoy walked beside and slightly behind her.  _ Say something,  _ she begged him, silently. A prayer in vain. Her arm smarted, scratching against the bandage. Already scabbing over.

They would go up to the castle and… 

She could not envision it. Would they pretend as though nothing had happened?

What was supposed to have happened?

It was the longest conversation she had ever had with someone who was not Crookshanks.

Dinner would be a dour affair, held in the cavernous Great Hall, the vaulted ceiling a gaping maw poised to snap her up.  _ Please, do.  _ She would keep her eyes on her plate. The air would smell of indulgent, untouched food; underlying it, notes of moist flesh and fear, a bitter tang.

Lord Voldemort’s courtiers feared him. And why shouldn’t they? His voice, whisper-soft, but threaded with such malice it was nigh impossible to prevent one’s bowels from turning liquid when he spoke.

Someone may try to speak to her and Lord Voldemort would answer in her place.

_ This conversation is not for you,  _ he would say without having to use words.  _ Sit there, look pretty, and smile while the real people talk.  _

Reduced to a plaything, an ornament. Stay quiet and look witless, she would tell herself. Smile, vacantly, and nod. She would smile, vacantly, and nod like she always did, and they would all soon learn to ignore her.

Maybe it was better that way. To see but not be seen, flitting on the periphery, fading into the stones—its own sort of freedom. She felt rather than saw Malfoy’s helmet move, facing her, eyes on the back of her neck. Burning; she felt that look.

He saw her. 

She turned her face to him but nausea surged through her gut with enough force she stumbled, catching herself on the castle steps, cloak sliding to the ground. She sucked in air through her aching throat, bringing the sickness to a rolling boil. It pounded in her stomach like a second heartbeat.

A heartbeat. For one horrible moment, she felt it, bright and clear and pure, a seed of light inside her, trembling like a dying flame. 

Harsh cackling pelted against her shaking back. She lifted her head to find a sneering face framed by wild, wiry black hair. A dark lion, a true witch. Where there had been a quivering candle in her belly, there was nothing. Bellatrix watched the realisation creep into her eyes and loosed another crazed roar of laughter.

_ I’ll kill you.  _ Hermione struck out, fingers like claws poised to attack, rip, tear, but dark tendrils curled around her hand and twisted, a sickening crack. A short, piercing scream; her own, but she didn’t feel it in her throat. Pain was distant and insubstantial as morning mist.

Heaving waves of magic battered against her ribcage, seismic in their intensity but with nowhere to go, nothing to do but consume her. Faintness rose like a tidal wave and she slumped to the side.

Malfoy, sword raised, sprinting. Her stomach twisted, a silent scream tearing through her lungs. No blade could contend with magic. He would die.

He would die.

_ No, no… _

Darkness pressed in on her. Crawling forwards, scraped knees, scuffed palms, blistering agony. Blood on her legs. A scarlet stain blooming on her white dress, between her thighs. Reaching for him, shards of bone crunching in her ruined hand.

Him, pinned to the stone by great pillars of twisting dark. She breathed in, out, glass fractals in her throat. Tried to yell a warning; Bellatrix’s arm swept down—

And caught on the air. 

“If you attack my son again, I shall ensure that it is the last thing you ever do, sister or no.” 

White-blonde hair, an emerald green dress whipping about the woman’s ankles in an unnatural wind. She clenched her fist and Bellatrix staggered to her knees as though forced there by invisible hands.

“Take Her Ladyship to the tower room,” she said to Malfoy. “The Dark Lord approaches.”

Bellatrix whimpered.

Hermione’s fingers twitched. She listened to it all as though drowning again. Floating in a deep, deep lake, water above and below, smothering light and sound. Drifting down to jagged rocks.

She’d lost her baby three days ago. Much to lay bare in that thought: her baby; she’d had a child blossoming inside of her, now lost. Extinguished. 

_ Thank Godric for small mercies,  _ said her head. Not so her heart; it cracked, hot lava pouring forth and solidifying, volcanic glass in her chest, again and again until she was hard and brittle and sawlike inside.

She wanted to hit something. Unleash her magic and lay waste to the whole damned castle, crushing them all, and herself, under the rubble. She searched for the power in her core and felt it glistening beneath her sternum, a small golden kernel. Out of reach, always just out of reach, so close she could skim her fingertips against the edge but never latch on.

The tower room was cold—even in the height of summer—with thin, stale air. Gauzy curtains around the bed swayed, stirred by draughts seeping through fissures in the window frame. Empty shelves along the walls. A washbasin. A changing screen, once colourful but now faded, depicting a man and woman in a coiled, Hellenistic embrace, pomegranates and cornucopias around the edges.

She imagined raking her fingers through the curtains, rending them like fragile cobwebs, tipping the shelves, shattering the basin, blood-stained ceramics in a halo around her feet.

_ What’s to stop me? _

She flexed her bandaged fingers—or tried to; the bones had been set and splinted, wrapped tightly enough she could barely move them. No pain; the healer’s tinctures saw to that.

“Your hand will be healed in a month or so, My Lady.” The healer moved behind her; musical chiming, glass against glass, fabric whispering into leather. He cleared his throat. “After a few days of bed rest, you’ll be ready to conceive again.”

She wanted to hit something; why not let it be him? Instead, she breathed, agitating the sheer lace bordering the windows.

Beneath, the castle's angled roofs rose and fell like hills, limned with honeyed morning light, contrasted by the bruise-dark storm brewing on the horizon. It would be here by nightfall.

“What happened to Bellatrix?”

“I’m surprised you cannot feel it from here, My Lady.”

The bitter character of the tea still coated her tongue. She was insensate, torpid, incapable of feeling anything beyond the harsh grating in her breast. She skimmed a finger along the window ledge and rubbed the dust with her thumb. Silken, vaguely chalky.

Sense oozed back into her once she opened herself to it. First, the crack of distant thunder tumbling through her nerves. Then the vibration through the soles of her feet, raw power shuddering up through the castle’s belly, carrying with it the howling echo of an inhuman shriek.

She smiled, lips peeling back from her teeth. “I can feel it, now.”

What had she become? A withered, twisted, spiteful little creature, something within her so irreparably broken that frissons of delight ran through her at the long, high-pitched wail reverberating between the stones and within the confines of her skull.

Vicious loathing soared through her gut. “Leave me.”

She stayed by the window long after the healer had left, pinching at her decolletage until it went numb, heat prickling behind her eyelids, but she was so very sick of weeping. What good were her tears but to make her pillow wet?

Soft rustling at the door made her turn, and only then did she realise that day had given way to dusk and long shadows fell across the room like cage bars. She approached the door; the wood was cool against her forehead.

“Is it you?”

A beat of quiet. Which did she dread more: the echo or the answer?

“It’s me.”

Stone limbs dragged her to the floor, wisps of pale fabric fanning about her legs. She leaned her head back and let her voice drift through the keyhole.

“I don’t even know your name.”

Nor did she expect to ever know. Shadows inched over her bare toes, skimmed the hem of her nightgown, stalking with purpose; corrosive, these shadows, prone to leaving macerated, syrupy slops wherever they passed. Her gaze turned inwards, pitching into the soporific depths she had so feared but now found welcoming, a place to find forgotten pieces of herself.

The cut on her arm seared, hurling her from her mind and back into her body. Metal scraping against wood made her head snap up. Malfoy, sliding down the door; her obverse, her mirror.

A long, rattling sigh, then pregnant silence. 

“Draco,” he finally said.

Her breath hitched.  _ Draco.  _ Such power did a name hold, she felt already the red thread wefting, twining first around her wrist, then her breastbone, then his ribs, his fingers. The mirrored sphere wavered and she saw for a single heartbeat into his mind: shadows, silver serpents, blood-stained steel, her own face, glistening, blue-tinged lips.

A strangled grunt through the door, armour barking against stone; he staggered to his feet, she saw it all through his eyes. She blinked and the room shimmered sporadically into focus. She was on her feet, swaying.

“Don’t do that again.” His voice was low but hard, quavering.

The door, flat against her back, him on the other side, somehow burning her skin through the wood. A pink flush swept up her throat, her heart pattering impossibly fast.

“I’m sorry.”

No response. He moved silently but she felt him leave, the red thread pulling taut, tugging at her sternum and the tender heart beneath.

She threw open the door at the same moment a thunderbolt quaked through the tower room. He turned, a hand on the pommel of his blade.

The silvery-black of his helm gleamed, reflecting muted lamplight and storm flashes. Tall, sombre, that blank metal face dangled her over the abyss again, one step from careening over the edge, no certainty that she would ever reach the bottom.

The moment stretched between them, voiceless and swollen. Another crash of thunder; she startled, pulse hammering in her throat, bare feet whispering over the stone towards him. Her hand stilled in the air, so close to his helmet that the cool nip of metal bled through her bandages.

Anxiety had a stranglehold on her stomach but she relished it, this powerful sensation after long stretches of a drugged, bottomless existence.

With the soft rasp of metal, she lifted his helmet. His eyes dipped to her, strained, the skin of his face cut from stone. Her eyes roved over him, his cheekbones, jaw, hairline. Mouth. Followed soon after by her fingertips, tracing him, committing every detail to memory.

To hold on to, in whatever moments she might need to disappear within herself.

Standing flush against her, he swept his palm across her cheek, smoothing hair behind her ear. Two heartbeats, galloping in concordance behind metal and bone. 

She swallowed heavily and dove into the abyss. 

Taking his hands, she walked backwards and kicked the door closed behind him.

Armour, shed as petals do, black marks on the stone in a breadcrumb trail. Cobweb curtains swaying, stirred by their air as they moved into the room, the backs of her thighs pressed against the bed, teetering; the precipice looming. Before she fell, she peeled off his gloves and pressed their palms together. 

A tremor went through him. He closed his eyes, captured by an unnatural stillness, choked breaths ruffling her hair. She drew his hand to her lips, kissed his inner wrist; his eyes snapped open.

Enveloping her, he held her with a clockmaker’s delicacy, leaning her back ever so carefully. The florid glow of the storm cast his face in light and shadow, reflecting in the silver and steel of his eyes.

It was as though she had known him forever. Known and would know. Her chest hollowed: breathtaking, breathless, her lungs without air.

Lips, dragged down her throat to where her flesh ended and the nightgown began, hands skimming down the fabric, dragging it up, cool air and flashing thunderlight on her bare thighs.

Meadowsweet. Leather and iron. The fresh, familiar, nameless scent curling on her tongue. With every sigh and gulp of air, she tasted him, drew him closer, sweet humming in her head blotting out the rain.

He hugged her against him, a fist curled in her hair, his mouth brushing her shoulder. She tugged at the laces of his gambeson until it opened for her, revealing pale skin crisscrossed with scars, warm and firm beneath her palm. Her ruined hand lay beside her head. Electricity skittered through her veins when his calloused thumb brushed the delicate skin of her inner wrist, fingers coiling around the bandages, intertwined, that small point of connection enough to make her belly heat.

The lightest brush over her stomach, waist, hip left her damp skin scored with his touch, feverish and glowing. She hoped he left marks. Sigils on her flesh,  _ memento caritate.  _ Not a dream, not a dream.  _ Real, real, real _ her blood sang as she pushed his trousers down past his hips. 

Her chest tightened. Quickly, quickly, they must be quick. To be caught like this would mean death, and she had never felt so alive. She clung to him, face buried in his neck, and canted her hips.

A nudge at her entrance; she stopped breathing. He pressed into her, wringing a shaky sigh that tumbled from her lips like water. He leaned forwards, pressing their foreheads together, rocking into her at the deep, rolling pace of the thunder.

Gasping breaths mingled in the hair’s-breadth of space between their parted lips. Close enough to kiss, but he turned and buried his face in her hair. His low, ragged groans pulsed through her, running in spasmodic patterns from her ear to her aching core.

Her world had shrunk. There was only the feel of him and the crashing storm. 

Nails digging into the bedding, silk and shadows, her hands skating over his sweat-slickened shoulders, gripping, urging. Toes curling, back arching, heels pressed deep into quivering haunches, heartstrings pulled tight and pluck, pluck, plucked, melodic between the lightning strikes.

Toppling over the edge of the abyss was sweeter than death. The ground soared to meet her and she shattered, head thrown back, the curtains lurching like snow flurries.

Draco stayed with her until her trembling eased and his harsh breaths slowed. He gathered his armour, naked flesh luminescent in the intermittent lightning, and left the tower room empty, cold, and laced with the fading scent of their lovemaking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big thank you to VulgarAssassin and amilyx over on the DoF Discord server for giving me some feedback on that last scene. I really appreciate it!
> 
> Credit:  
> “If you attack my son again, I shall ensure that it is the last thing you ever do." (Narcissa in The Half-Blood Prince, Chapter 6)
> 
> "The echo or the answer" (A magnet poem by @shminsington on Twitter)


	4. Chapter 4

Autumn had come and with it, a harvest festival. Servants toiled beneath a still-brutal sun, pruning the hedges, shaping the flower beds, erecting canvas marquees over long trestle tables already piled high with food. Snatches of conversation slipped through the open window but Hermione could scarcely hear it over the chattering of her handmaidens as they tugged at her hair and brushed gold shimmer over her temples.

She could not stand her reflection. Too thin, pallid skin, pinched mouth—corpse-like in every way but her eyes; her eyes gleamed, bright and youthful and ardent. It was her eyes that she hated the most.

Grief should have left them dead and sunken, showing the soul within to be a withered husk alike with her empty womb, but she found she had no more space for suffering, not when there was something, finally, bisecting the monotony. Draco.

Every time with him was like the first. Door opened, wordlessly, armour shed, nightgown discarded, tangled limbs, panting breaths, kisses on every part of the body but the lips; they were always left wanting. Quickly, quickly, quiet, quiet, lest they be heard. Once the pleasured quivering faded, he would gather his armour and leave.

Glance back, only once, from the doorway. Every time.

She always considered calling after him. Begging him to stay, laying her head on his chest, his breaths lulling her to sleep, saving her from her thoughts for just a little while longer. But she had already asked too much.

So he left, and she slept, fitfully, her dreams filled with a curly-haired boy who was never to be and Bellatrix’s cawing laughter echoing in her ears.

A bright sting in her shoulder brought her back to the room and her reflection in the vanity. Her hair was swept into an elegant updo, a glittering silver tiara placed upon the curls. Regal. She’d never felt like Lady Hermione before. 

A spot of blood appeared on the neckline of her silver dress like a ruby brooch, seeping. She touched her fingers to it and was surprised when they came away wet and red. So fragile, her skin a tender apricot, splitting, easy access to the soft flesh. 

The room was silent—the sort of heavy quiet you could reach into and squeeze, wringing out the dread. A soft plink drew her eyes to a gleaming silver pin, the sharp point stained crimson. Her handmaiden trembled in the looking glass, wide eyes and shuddering lips, hands pressed over her heart, clutching a gossamer cape as though protecting her modesty. Hermione fingered the bauble at the end of the pin, her thumb running over ridged metal scales and a wide, hissing mouth.

The feel of it made something black and vicious rasp against her jagged edges, throwing up sparks. Acidic fire in her throat, curling in her mouth, clamped teeth, fist clenched tightly around the needle edge. Hot, damp pain in her hand; more blood, beading in her fist then rolling, drops on her satin slippers. 

“Give me the cape.” 

Her handmaiden hastened to obey, draping the fabric over her shoulders before stepping back, fingers pressed against her lips.

Hermione pulled her own strings—plucked herself like a marionette—prying her fingers apart and affixing the pin at her collarbone. The cape flowed down her back like liquid starlight. 

She almost longed for the relentless prattling of her handmaidens. When they were like this, silent and terrified and recoiling, they looked so young. She walked past them, through them, a phantom on incorporeal legs. No feeling. Numb from the neck down, but she could never manage to anaesthetise her churning mind.

There was only one person who could do that and he was on the other side of the door, ready to escort her to the festival. She breathed in, out, but couldn’t feel her lungs inflating. Quite blissful, to be insensate, though she wished she knew how to control it, so she might benumb herself in the moments when she needed it most.

It wasn’t Draco waiting in the corridor but Lord Voldemort. Her stomach lurched, the torpor peeling away in strips, exposing every bone, nerve, and sinew to his incisive gaze; sweeping over her gown, the tiara, the pin and the red blossoming beneath.

“You’ve had an accident.” His palm drifted over the stain and it disappeared instantly, as did the small wound. “There. All better.”

She forced herself not to shy away from his touch, but something must have shown in her face for his fingers ran a frosty trail from her shoulder to her wrist, seizing it in a vice-like grip. She bit her tongue against a pained yelp; the bones in her healing hand screamed, tendrils of fire racing up her arm. She wished she were numb.

“We can’t have my precious wife injuring herself, can we? Although…” Trying to rip her hand free only made him hold her tighter. Cool air hit her skin as he wrenched up her sleeve, exposing pale skin and the short, pinkish scar. “... young Draco has already sought to prevent that, I see.”

Her pulse was frenzied and galloping, wild horses loosed on the rolling fields of her stomach.  _ He knows. He knows, oh, gods above, he knows.  _ Sweat prickled along her backbone, silver fabric clinging. Bile in her throat, bitter and sour; she might be sick. Once the initial, terrifying pang subsided, she was left shaky and uneasy, making herself meet his eyes without trembling.

“I cut myself in the garden.”

It was a feeble lie. He smiled, slow and predatory, his thumb scraping against her skin, rolling down her sleeve.

“Of course you did, little dove.”

Walking through the castle on his arm, muscles wound so tightly they might snap, was torment like no other.  _ Where is Draco?  _ She travelled along the red thread in her breast, hand over hand, feeling her way through the dark, but there was no end. She could not feel him.

Come to me, she wanted to whisper, but daren’t, not with Lord Voldemort’s talons rubbing against the outer confines of her mind. She imagined him catching the thought and batting it between his paws while it squealed and writhed.

_ Draco.  _ Lord Voldemort’s hand on her lower back was cold as ice.  _ Draco.  _ The ballroom loomed, frightening in its majesty.  _ Draco.  _ Sunset through stained glass, fat rubies, amethysts, and sapphires on her dress in honeycomb spirals, then outside, the sun so bright she shaded her eyes.

Her gaze found him through the glare. She forced herself to keep walking, to ignore the shaking in her legs and the sudden urge to collapse into tears. Alive—he was alive. Golden light glowed in his hair and played on the green threads of his cloak. His armour was different; not the full plate she was used to, but slim and elegant, made for special occasions. He was bent low in conversation to his mother—the emerald-garbed witch who had saved them both—and a courtly man who must have been his father. He didn’t seem to be injured, though his expression was hard and intent.

The tautness of her muscles unwound, leaving her floating, tethered to the earth only by Lord Voldemort’s arm threaded through hers. To run to Draco, fling her arms around his neck, would be folly—her mind knew this, but her heart pined for his touch.

His father jabbed the butt of his cane into Draco’s foot; he looked up. Their eyes met.

Met as blades do, violently, though nonetheless beautiful with every flashing thrust and parry. Her heart gave a painful thud.  _ Don’t react.  _ A prayer to herself and to him.  _ Don’t react. Look away, look away. _

She cast her eyes down. Carpets had been laid over the grass, long trails of red winding through the trestle tables to stop at the edges of fountains, faintly damp, tousled, dozens of feet kicking up the edges and leaving them curled like old parchment. Draco’s eyes were a brand, scorching her exposed face and throat. She readjusted her tiara and realised her fingers were trembling.

_Don’t look._ The feel of Lord Voldemort’s arm through her sleeve left her damp-skinned and rickety; a house on stilts, ravenous water eating at the supports. Smile, vacantly, and nod, she told herself. Vacant, vacancy; ready for occupation, a space needing filling. 

_ But I’m still here.  _

Her cheeks ached. She wanted to go back to the cottage by the lake.

It was somehow worse when Lord Voldemort released her arm and left her adrift in the crowd; a ship lost at sea, surging waves left and right, caught in an undertow, eddying, whirling, capsising. A hand grasped her shoulder.

_ Draco, no.  _ Sickness swooped through her gut and seized her heart in a fierce, squeezing grip. Someone would see, he mustn’t—she whirled to face him and was met instead with the long, severe countenance of her father.

“Hermione.”

She blinked. Magic roared to the surface so quickly she saw stars, but the tea did its work and she was left swaying, ill, a rabid heat fizzling beneath her skin.

“I do not wish to speak to you.” She pressed a hand to her forehead and found it burning hot. 

“You will listen to me.” His grip on her shoulder tightened. “The Order of the Phoenix grows bolder, venturing farther from the forest with every passing day. We need the Dark Lord’s forces to keep them at bay and he will only provide those forces if you provide him with an heir.”

“Are you suggesting I hasten on?” Her eyebrows rose.

“It has been almost a year.”

The magic migrated to her throat, burning, choking her. She heaved air through her nose. “Remove your hand from me, Father.”

“You are behaving like a child. Elevate your efforts, girl, or—” His words ended in a strangled yelp, the hand on her shoulder abruptly lifting, flying to his throat. Red splotches appeared in the hollows of his cheeks.

“Good evening, Granger,” said a voice like velvet. Narcissa Malfoy clasped her hands genteelly but there was no mistaking the steel in her gaze nor the power drifting from her like mist. “I believe you were about to threaten Her Ladyship, though I clearly must have misheard you.”

Her father’s face had turned puce. A low whine rose from the depths of his throat, his lips flapping around the sound, spluttering, fingers scratching at his windpipe as though to open it up. He stared beseechingly at Hermione through bulging eyes.

Saliva pooled in her mouth; she was seized by an overwhelming urge to spit in his face, but the commotion had attracted onlookers. She swallowed thickly and turned her back on him.

“That’s enough,” she said, keeping her voice soft enough for Narcissa’s ears alone.

Her father sank to the floor in a heaving, wheezing pile. Narcissa smiled beatifically, smoothing her hands down the front of her dress; a woman finished with a chore and ready to proceed to the next.

“Very well. The night draws close, ladies and gentlemen. Shall we proceed inside?”

In the whispering and rustling that followed, Narcissa turned to her, unsmiling. Be careful, she seemed to say in the pursing of her lips. Do not hurt my son. She briefly squeezed Hermione’s hand before melting into the crowd.

Hermione let herself be swept up, carried on a wave of damask and floral perfume and deposited like a moraine in the centre of the ballroom. The limelights had been lit outside, casting distorted, kaleidoscopic patterns through the stained glass, marble columns glinting, glossy dance floor polished to such a high shine she could see her reflection. There was still blood on her shoes.

A string quartet burst to life in the corner of the room—every note was a serrated blade across her nerves, fraying her to the bone. Too much sound, colour, light. A headache bloomed behind her eyes, pulsing under her scalp at every point the tiara poked and prodded.

She needed to find a quiet corner to collect herself but had no sooner stepped off the dance floor when she was caught around the waist and spun into a waltz.

“Where are you running off to?” Lord Voldemort’s iron grip on her hand brought tears to her eyes. He squeezed until she choked on a gasp; she felt him smile against her cheek. “It must be nice to indulge in a little dancing after so long. When was your last ball, dove?” He pretended to hum in thoughtful contemplation. “Your presentation ceremony, it must have been.”

Her skin was too tight, pinching at the seams—at any moment she would burst and spill out onto the marble floor—yet every brush of his hand on her waist had her shrivelling, growing smaller and smaller inside herself, a night flower curling away from sunlight.

The stares, cast from the corners of eyes, were glancing blows against her backbone—to look directly at her would be to make oneself complicit, and this was a court of the unknowing, cheeks turned the other way, reflective smiles, her crumbling image shining back at her from pearly teeth. Her own mother would not meet her gaze.

She was as Hermione remembered but older, marcescent, folds of fabric hanging from her like sagging, carmine flesh, a gold chain and heavy ruby pendant bowing her neck into a vulture-like curve. Hermione stared and stared over Lord Voldemort’s shoulder but her mother’s attention remained adamantly fixed on her crumpled hands. She used to have such beautiful, nimble hands, creating works of art with her fingers and a crochet hook, but Hermione doubted she could even wind wool, now. The joints looked too swollen.

If she would only look up, all would be forgiven.  _ Look up. Look up, Mother. Please. _

Silver silk fluttered around her ankles as they spun, dancing on a keening composition, higher and higher, ear-splitting. With every turn she snapped her head; her mother never left her sight for more than a blink.

_ Look up. _

It would be better to have been left on the doorstep of an orphanage as an infant, swaddled in wool and cotton with a tear-stained note tucked beside her sleeping face, growing up with a tender, love-filled heart for parents woven from childish fantasy and storybook shimmer, than to witness her mother turning her back and walking away, joined soon thereafter by her splotchy-faced father, together, alone, the ballroom doors closing, a final death knell.

She sagged against Lord Voldemort as the waltz went on and on and on. She couldn’t cry, not in front of him; her tears would taste like nectar on his forked tongue. Oh, but it burned, behind her eyes, in her nose, her throat, suffocating; she would drown, and there was no Draco to wrench her from the black and breathe life into her lungs.

Only, he was there, a fixed rock in a swollen river; he existed in the spaces between the violin notes. His eyes found hers and the space between them yawned, cavernous and insurmountable. He could feel it, too. His hands curled and uncurled at his sides; she hoped the ache to reach out had settled as deeply in his bones as it had in hers.

In another life, she might have been holding his hand, his arm around her, his breath on her cheek. Closing her eyes, she could picture it. Pale and flimsy, an apparition behind a veil; just the shape of them spinning slowly in a forest glade, clinging together in a silent dance.

She blinked and it was gone.

The song ended but Lord Voldemort kept her caged with hard hands around her shoulders as he manoeuvred them to the edge of the dance floor.

“Refrain from consuming any wine, my dear. I wish to sow an heir on you as soon as possible. If all else fails,” He seized her jaw, his grip punishingly tight until she looked at him. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, shining behind his eyes. “I can always let Bella have at you.”

He released her and performed a short, mocking bow, leaving her to right herself against a pillar.

Bellatrix was alive. 

She clutched the fluting, breathing hard, blinking against the dark spots crowding at the edge of her vision.

How could she be alive? She’d murdered Lord Voldemort’s unborn son and heir, and he was not a forgiving man. Perhaps he had lied—an idle threat to enforce Hermione’s obedience, but he must have known there was something infinitely more precious to threaten than her life.

She looked for Draco in the roiling mass of dancing bodies. He rose above the crowd, immutable and steadfast, his pale hair gleaming. She took a step and so did he. Lord Voldemort was gone, for the moment. One touch, a brush of their fingers as they passed, would be enough. One touch, just to assure herself that he was there and waiting for her.

Narcissa caught his arm, her elegant face grey and drawn. Her lips moved, beads of sweat glittering under the limelights; Draco shook her off but she held fast, speaking quickly, eyes flitting with insect-like speed around the ballroom, calculating, cold, but oh, the love she held for him in that steely grip made Hermione’s heart burn. She wore glinting silver rings inset with jade and emerald, digging into her fingers as Draco tried again to tug free. 

They were beautiful, the most beautiful pieces of jewellery Hermione had ever seen. Only the rings and Hermione’s knocking pulse existed; looking at Draco would break the resolve she had built layer by layer around her heart, drawing from Narcissa’s strength.  _ Be strong,  _ she whispered, beginning to turn away, closing her eyes.  _ Don’t look,  _ but how could she not? He was so close, she met his eyes, he reached for her but stopped, fingers curling, hand falling, the shadows returned, seeping at the edges, ink in milk, swirling until there was only his face, pale and sharp, the music faded away. She could see in his eyes a fracturing she felt in her chest, like stepping in a winter puddle, broken seams radiating outwards, the ice made more beautiful for the breaking. 

His gaze flickered to the terrace doors, then to her, and Hermione allowed herself to nurse the hope blooming to life in her abdomen.

_ I will see you outside, my love. _


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first part of this chapter is inspired by Avendell's 'Princess and Knight' artwork, the fairytale AU kiss that started it all. 
> 
> And... look at this amazing aesthetic Shelly made!! I'm in looovvveeeee 🥰 The colour palette is everything, the images are perfect, and the lake!!! I can't stop grinning when I look at this, seriously. Tysm once again Shelly!! xxx (also also, a gorgeous aesthetic/manip by Shelly is now the header of this fic on chapter one ❤️)

It was a cloudy night but the moon was out; a thick slice casting the world in patchy pools of silver. She stole onto the terrace and down the stairs, her slippered feet near-silent, tip-toeing, head bowed, running free. She should not be doing this.  _ I know, I know,  _ said her fluttering pulse. 

Into the gardens, the hedges ingesting her, farther, farther, the willow trees ghostly and pale, her shape in the shallow pond wraith-like, her cape a gossamer river. Would he follow? She wanted to look over her shoulder but made herself be still.

Wet earth, stagnant water, heady flowers drowsy from the onset of autumn. She closed her eyes and breathed in these scents, straining to hear over the blood pounding in her ears. 

Would he dare? 

Would she?

Meadowsweet and iron. She turned, slowly; he was a few steps away—no helmet, but with features carved from granite and carefully guarded all the same.

Her gaoler, her protector, and now her lover. A thrill went through her stomach and up to her lips. She moved, or perhaps he did, or they moved together, for they were close enough to touch, to taste, the crescent moon reflecting in his eyes, twin silver scythes.

He trailed the backs of his gloved fingers along her cheek, setting the skin alight. His other hand freed her hair from its chignon; it tumbled down her back and around her face, stirred in a soft nighttime breeze.

“This is treason.” His throat bobbed, hand sliding away, falling to his side in a balled fist.

Ice speared through her chest. His face came and went in the scudding cloud shadows, all at once beautiful and distant.

“Yes.” He held her tender, beating heart in his hand and she let him, knowing that he could crush it with the barest twitch of his fingers. “It is.”

He looked away, a muscle ticking in his jaw. Tick, tick, tick, like a clock, hands inching closer to midnight; spellbound with no fairy godmother to save them.

“There are other people in this castle I must protect.” He stepped away, putting space between them as though laying down a wall. Brick over brick over brick, every backwards step another coat of mortar, higher, teetering towards the night sky and its delicate slivered moon.

Oh, to be someone with a family to protect. A wonderful feeling, she assumed. To love and be loved, unreservedly, with such devotion it must be physically painful.

The hardness inside her returned, crackling like heated glass. Your mother is perfectly capable of taking care of herself, she might have said, but every moment spent in the garden was another loop in the signature of their death warrant. The hope in her belly was a rose bush, wilting petals peeling away from the core, stems drooping, petals soft as velvet against her insides, but she had no magic; she wasted away, dull, fetid, grey, tired, like the husk of a mutilated building.

She didn’t look at him as she walked away. Doing so would surely pulverise her already shattering heart. A shadow fell over the moon and the world was cast in darkness, thick and syrupy, blotting out individual leaves until the hedges were long, solid oblongs muffling all sound; there was only her unsteady heartbeat and the singular crunching of gravel, then another pair of footsteps joined the fray, quicker than hers and discordant, loud and grating. Still, she did not turn.

He blocked her path, breathing hard, eyes wild and glowing like spinning coins. For a heartbeat, an aeon, they stared at one another over the abyss. He moved first, standing so close she had to tilt her head to meet his gaze. A whisper of a not-quite kiss swept her lips as he spoke.

“I wish…” His eyes flitted over her face—a man dying of thirst, he drank her in, hands rising to cup her chin like cool, fresh water. “I wish…”

_ I wish we were free. _

_ I wish you would kiss me. _

Speaking his wish aloud would invite ill omens to swoop in and carry it away, so she silenced him with a press of her mouth. Slow, light, just the barest brush of lips, but she felt it down to her toes in the moments before she pulled away.

Beautiful, he was beautiful under the flimsy moonlight, silver gilding the planes of his face and all its sharp edges, drifting in hazy smudges over his parted lips and knitted brows. He opened his eyes and their stares collided, then their mouths, flint and steel, igniting, consuming. 

She burned.

His hands plunged into her hair, hungry kisses, devouring, wildfire loosed on wide pine forests, blazing heat. She hugged him close, stepped in to him, forged anew in the flames.  _ Let this never end. _ Wrapped in his scent and feel, she was alive, lips moving against his, opening to him; his tongue swept her mouth and she moaned, a wanton sound. Pink suffused her cheeks, burning brighter when she felt his soft laugh against her lips, then her throat, his mouth skimming a flaming trail to her collarbone and back again.

If only she could take this moment, set it in amber, and place it in a locket over her heart. That way, it would never fade; they would be forever young, luminescent with lust and something else she daren’t name.

“Run away with me,” she whispered. Their foreheads rested together, noses brushing, mouths touching with every word. She tightened her grip on his waist. “We could go into the forest, find the Order of the Phoenix. We could help them, Draco. They could help us.”

“We would be caught.”

“Not on horseback. We could leave tonight and be in the heart of the woods before the dawn.”

He drew away from her, bending one knee so they were level. His thumb ran a smooth arc over her cheek, warm and rough, stopping at the corner of her eye, cradling her like untempered glass. “I won’t risk harm befalling you.”

“I have already been harmed.” She clutched his hand and pressed her face into its warmth. “Again and again and again, I have been harmed. Run away with me.”

Lies left echoes. With this fact, she was intimate. A pebble dropped in a placid pool caused infinite bands of ripples to fan from the point of contact to the shore, visible long after the tiny stone has been lost. She saw in his eyes the echo of those ripples as he agreed to leave the castle. I will see you tonight, he said, but the words were pensive and detached. 

Return to the ballroom and I will follow, leaving enough time so as not to be suspicious.

I will see you tonight. 

Would he?

Combed, cleaned, and made ready for sleep, Hermione sat on the edge of the bed, feet free and swaying, tongue tingling with mint and bitter herbs. Which would be worse: to leave having never seen him again, or for his crestfallen face to be her last memory? Each was too terrible to bear thinking about but think she must—time was a luxury she was not afforded much of, these days.

Think, think, think, but she wasn’t thinking, not really—merely rearranging her mind into neat flower bed rows; amaryllis, violets, hibiscus, primrose. She missed her old room with the writing desk and thick woollen rug. Perhaps if she hadn’t destroyed it, she would still have her magic.

If she still had her magic, Bellatrix would be dead and she would be great with child, her waist thickened and doughy like old cream, her belly heavy, straining.

But she did not have her magic; just herself, her nightgown, and a pair of flimsy boots she pulled on and laced without feeling. Gardening boots. Comfortable enough, but not made for much more than ambling down paved garden paths and back inside, quickly now, lest she catch cold. She looked out over the Forbidden Forest, endlessly undulating in the weak moonlight, and imagined the biting cold of the shadows lurking beneath the boughs.

Tap, tap, her boots tapped against the floor, so loud after padding everywhere in bare feet or satin slippers. Her fingertips left ghostly marks on the windowpane, as did her breath. In, out, in, out. The forest was so much larger than she remembered.

Would she have time to retrieve  _ The Tales of Beedle the Bard  _ from its hiding place before she left? Where would it fit between the food, water, and supplies? She did not know where to procure food, water, and supplies, but it was too late for that thought to slow her.

The knock came sooner than she hoped. Her flower-bed thoughts were half planted, scraggly, in desperate need of cultivation, but she made herself open the door and step into Draco’s embrace.

“I cannot let you run.” His hand whispered down the ridges of her spine, curling in the fabric at the small of her back. “I’m sorry, Hermione. This is for your own good.”

Already, he was ushering her into the room with his body. 

“I understand.” She couldn’t hear the words over her thudding pulse.

Before he could speak, she angled her face and kissed him, hard, biting at his lips and spinning, pushing him into the room with both hands against his broad chest. 

The sounds she made were breathy and needy but no desire sparkled in her core as he kissed her back, teeth and tongue and low, throaty groans. There was only the subtle dance, the push and pull, the hungry undressing with one hand while her other felt for the edge of the door, her fingers caught, she broke away and slammed it in his face, a heavy clunk, the key turned and no amount of pounding fists or yells of  _ Hermione _ could open it.

His shouts haunted her through the castle, trailing in echoey wisps down the long corridors and tight spiral stairways, curling around her throat, a tightening noose. Caged sobs howled and snarled, throwing themselves against her breastbone until she was running doubled over, clutching at her chest. Running to where, she did not know. Away, towards, it was all synonymous, a rat in a trap, dashing around and around and around in circles.

Silver snakes stared at her through maliciously glittering emerald eyes. The library, cold and imposing, rising from the dark before she even knew where her feet had brought her. The doors swung smoothly open and she was inside, stumbling between the stacks, following a silent but throbbing pull from beneath her sternum, not quite in control of her own movements.

Floating, dream-like, towards the source of the dark pulsation brought her to a raised pedestal—on it, a diadem, dull metal wrought in the shape of outstretched wings, a twinkling sapphire in the centre. A dark thrill shot through her when her fingers closed around the eagle’s head, kindling her senses, opening her mind to the coolness of the cavernous chamber and the subtle crunching beneath her boots.

She could not see—the shadows coating the floor like fog were too complete. Autumn leaves, she told herself, even as snapped, jagged shards scratched at her calves and scraps of fabric caught under her feet. She kicked something hard and round and it went skittering down the steps, bouncing hollowly. 

Tiny vibrations shimmered from the diadem, racing through her sweat-slickened fingers and up to her shoulder, her neck, humming in the base of her skull.

The Dark Lord’s Horcrux. It had to be. What that was, what it meant, she did not know, but she took it, held it close, sequestered it away in a satchel she found, and ran, across the castle grounds and into the forest.

The glistening kernel inside of her shone brighter with every passing hour, burning through the foggy haze of bitter tea. She ran.

And ran.

Bleeding feet, ragged breaths, the tiny, barely-there seed of magic dwindling in her breast. Drumbeats on the winter earth, rolling through the dark trees like thunder.

“Won’t you look at me, Draco?”

He’s lit a fire. The xanthic gleam of it reflects back at her from his expressionless helm—he is a stranger again, black metal and dancing firelight. But wasn’t he always? She knows his body, the feel of every one of his outer edges, but the soul beneath is as strange and unfamiliar to her as it has always been. To him, she is a stranger, too. She wonders what he sees reflected in the glossy sheen of her eyes.

His chin lifts and the glowing flame-pattern crawls from his forehead to his cheek. “I am looking at you.”

“Properly.” She twists her hands—the bindings pull taut, scratching at her skin—and raises them in supplication. “Without the mask.”

Her heart beats in her throat, pulsing against the cold metal collar. It cuts deeper into her skin when she swallows heavily. He’s lifting his helmet, laying it aside, and although blazing heat squats between them inside the stone fire ring, it does not ward off the frigid sting in his gaze.

Clipped, constricted—coin purse eyes, cinched tight and knotted most intricately. To think: his eyes used to be silver coins, made for tossing in fountains and making wishes.

_ I wish, I wish,  _ but the time for wishes has passed.

“We’re in the forest. We could still run away.” She picks at a spot of lichen on the fallen tree she’s sitting on; it gives way easily under her fingernail, peeling up like a scab. In the corner of her eye, he moves, rising and pacing, a caged lion. He scratches the back of his head then stops, curling his hand into a fist which beats a tattoo on the side of his cuisse. Again and again, an uneven rattling, setting her teeth on edge. She knows he won’t answer, but she tries anyway. “How did you find me so quickly? How did you…”

“Escape from the room you locked me in?” His barked laugh is unnaturally loud in the muffling silence of the trees. “One of your handmaidens heard me. They have been listening quite frequently at the door, it seems.”

Her modesty should be all but stripped away, what with the bathing and the trussing and the perfuming for her nights with Lord Voldemort, but her cheeks still burn, engulfing her head in shameful heat. She drops her chin.

They knew. All along, her handmaidens knew. Lord Voldemort, too—of this, she is certain.

Her hands clench, the tendons in her wrist straining against the ropes. Why should she be ashamed? Draco is young, handsome, and she was so achingly lonely—who else was she to turn to for warmth? Anger courses through her, down her legs in fiery pulses until she’s standing, striding towards him. She will not go back to that castle. She would sooner die.

Her mouth opens to say as much but she is so very tired, and hungry—her stomach aches from it. The world shudders in and out, close and far, wavering, the squeeze and release of a great fist around the silver-lined trees.

He’s there to catch her when everything tips. His cloak—its scent fiercely familiar—settles around her shoulders, as does his arm, guiding her to the fallen tree, steadying her as the forest floor pitches and sways beneath her ravaged feet.

The sting of dirt and pine needles in the cuts and blisters is distant, a small window of caustic light at the end of a reaching tunnel. She can’t remember when she discarded her boots, or if they simply fell to pieces. Time dilates, this deep in the forest. It could be minutes or days since she fled and both would seem perfectly feasible. Could it really be morning? Daylight wafts through the canopy but it’s thin and dusty, incapable of piercing the consummate shadows pooling at the base of the trees.

Rest; she wants to rest.

“Eat.”

Warmth puffing under her chin, rich, savoury scents—she opens her eyes and Draco is crouched before her, holding out a steaming bowl. When she doesn’t move, he presses the rim against her lips.

She spits the broth in his face.

He’s taking her back to that venomous court. He hit her over the head with the pommel of his sword.

“You’re just like the rest of them.” She wipes her mouth on her shoulder, breathing hard through her nose. “Bastard.”

Liquid rolls from his temple, arcing over his cheekbone, down his face, dripping from the sharp point of his chin. He brushes it away and flicks it from his gloved fingers like raindrops. She expects him to speak, to make excuses, futilely apologise—raise his voice at her, perhaps. Instead, he cuts her hands free.

Feeling trickles back into her fingers as she flexes them. “And the collar?”

His eyes drop to it and quickly dart away. “I have my orders.” A heavy swallow. “I am loyal to the Dark Lord.”

“Are you?” She stops chafing feeling into her hands, angling his face towards her with a light brush of her fingers under his chin. The silver in his eyes is dull, tarnished, but no less unyielding. He sets his jaw; she feels the muscles shift. “Where was your loyalty when you were laying with his wife?”

A wood pigeon thump, thump, thumps, startled, through the trees and into the sky, such is the viciousness with which Draco wrenches himself away.

Once he’s gone, Hermione drinks the broth, feeling the collar against her throat with every swallow.


	6. Chapter 6

She drinks greedily, broth dribbling from the corners of her mouth in great streams, and each mouthful sloshing into her empty stomach warms her from the inside. With this warmth comes the pain.

No longer distant, the agony in her feet blisters through her legs and claws its way up the column of her spine, manifesting itself as a strangled gasp she can’t quite staunch, even though she tries, clamping her teeth tightly around the sound. She will not cry out. Whimpers stutter at the back of her throat and she rocks back and forth as though to lull the pain to sleep, but she will not ask him for help. Her pride will not allow it.

Draco is soon at her side—at a respectful distance, maintaining a length of loamy soil between himself and the reach of her fists—turning a metal tin over and over in his now-bare hands. She recognises it from the cottage and fancies she can catch a faint whiff of dittany, though this might be her imagination.

“Will you kick me in the teeth if I approach?”

_ I might.  _

This is the lie she tells herself.

She bites down on her lip hard enough to draw blood—anything to keep from making a noise as she uses her toes to swivel away from him. It stings and aches all at once, searing beneath her skin right down to the bone, burrowing deep into the marrow, curling inside, hibernating.

It is a pain which is not grievous enough to render her insensible but nonetheless feels as though it will be with her forever.

He follows, crouching within kicking distance, gazing at her levelly with the barest lift of his eyebrows; daring her, but she barely has the strength to set her ruined feet in his lap, biting her tongue against a fresh wave of pain.

His movements are quick and methodical—clinical, almost, but his fingers tremble and the tips of his ears flush as he rubs his palms together, chafing warmth into them, fire by friction. She flinches, sucking in a sharp breath when his hand closes over her ankle.

Cold. His fingers are still freezing cold, he’s holding her still, prying out pine needles and chips of bark with such delicate, subtle movements, but it  _ hurts,  _ Godric, it hurts. He winces up at her, apologetic; she gnaws sharp red patterns across her knuckles, sinking into this lesser, butterfly-kiss pain, cocooning herself. 

_ Think of something else. _

Draco’s hair falls over his forehead, swaying slightly, catching the weak light and shining like burnished white gold. He puffs it out of his eyes and her heart lurches in a double-beat. It’s so much longer than when she first met him, curling boyishly around his ears and down his nape. 

Think of something else, so she thinks of him, but what is he thinking? Lips set in a thin line, brows drawn close, bandaging her feet with his quick, pale spider hands, nostrils flaring, he breathes, slowly, deeply, she can’t read the swirling molten silver in his eyes. There is no pain, just the steady thumping of her heart, sunlight moving across the crown of his head, his hands skating higher, up to her ankle, her calf, expending the bandages. The backs of his fingers brush her skin and she holds her breath, waiting, waiting, for what?

Does he know what his touch ignites inside of her, that he is her anchor, her lodestone, her safe port in a wide, roiling sea? Even now, when he is rowing her into the open ocean to throw her overboard—fish food, masticated, ingested, and spat back out—she wants to touch and be touched by him, draw his lips to hers and let the forest recede into the middle distance.

It’s the most natural thing in the world to brush the hair from his face, soft strands running through her fingers. Stillness seizes him. He glances up at her and that short, flickering look cast through his lowered lashes is enough to catch the breath in her throat.

Damp palms, skittering pulse, stomach swooping and soaring like a flock of seabirds, she cups his cheeks and coaxes his eyes to hers. A long, low howl warbles through the trees, distant and lonely; the only sound above the whispering branches. He’s silent, staring up at her, lips parted slightly, hands clasped behind her knees, searching her eyes. For what?

What does he hope to see in their depths?

“Lord Voldemort will execute my family if I do not return you to the castle.”

_ Oh.  _ She sways backwards, her hands tightening around him, centring herself, fighting against the sudden lightheadedness descending like a body in free fall.

“They… they could escape. Your mother…”

“Is already imprisoned, as is my father. This is punishment, Hermione, for you and me both, make no mistake.”

Snowflakes spiral through the gaps in the canopy, falling thick and fast, alighting on his eyelashes and blinked just as quickly away. The year’s first snowfall. If she returns to the castle, will she have a window to see winter turn to spring? Will she be alive to see spring turn to summer?

She tilts her face to the snow, eyes closed, cold kisses on her skin, melting, trickling from the corners of her eyes, mingling with her warm tears.

“Dance with me,” she whispers to the air.

Such a strange request, but he has lifted her with two hands around her waist before she even opens her eyes. Cradled to him, one arm banded behind her thighs, the other across her shoulders, he spins them, carefully, her bandaged feet hovering above the ground. Flecks of white drift around and above them, dancing on air, swirling in time to music she feels in her bones.

Faces pressed together, arms around her, clinging, she breathes in the frost and loam and feels this perfect moment suspend itself in time, pressed tightly between the pages of an old book, brittle and paper-like and fragile but so, so beautiful in all its faded colour glory. Her heart swells, then her lungs, her diaphragm, cold air licks her throat and her eyes snap open to the heavy thud of the metal collar, discarded on the forest floor beneath the tattered shreds of her nightdress.

Draco’s hand is warm on the back of her neck but soon feels cold in comparison—magic soars through her in great droves, burning, healing, her skin glowing like a firebrand, her feet made whole and supple beneath the twinkling waves of power.

He’s freed her. She slides down his body to stand, hands on his shoulders, gazing up at him with a question in her eyes.  _ Why?  _

His lips twitch into a sad smile. A life in Lord Voldemort’s castle is not a life worth living; he knows this. How could she ever believe he was a stranger?

“Come with me.” A vision of what their lives could be wavers tenuously in her mind’s eye, a peaceful cottage on the far edge of a distant forest; she grips his hands, pouring that idyllic scape into him, but he shakes his head and steps away, still with that small, sad smile, maintaining a connection of their fingers until the last possible moment. Her hand falls to her side, suddenly icy without his touch. 

Stones fill the chambers of her heart. He will try to save his parents. He will die.

Each moment she spent confined within the castle walls cascades through her consciousness like raindrops down a windowpane, tearing the wounds open, blood and tears and screams, echoing, but she would endure it a thousand times over if only to save him—her one bright star in the blackest night.

His horse nickers softly as she approaches, runs her hand down its neck and unties the reins from the low bough they were tied to. She looses a shaky breath, willing the bubbling in her stomach to settle. “I will be with you until the last.”

She means it. Her heart thuds unevenly and a thin sheen of sweat has broken out along her spine, but she will ride with him until night falls and the castle looms menacingly against an indigo sky, she will be with him as they breach the gates and until their last breaths are gasped—oh, she hopes she dies first, and cleanly. It is a vain hope, but she holds it close to her chest all the same.

Silence reigns for three rises and falls of the horse’s breath, curling in the air around her, before Draco’s steps crackle and his warmth spreads across her back. He lifts her up and swings onto the saddle behind her then they’re riding, slowly at first, but soon at a pace where the forest slides by in a blur of green and grey.

Lodged in her throat, her heart shares the horse’s reckless speed, pattering so quickly she can feel her grasp on the writhing power slipping away piece by piece. It crouches on her chest and digs white-hot needles into her skin, pricking and prodding, searching for release.

_ Hold on, hold on. Save it for Lord Voldemort. Save it for Bellatrix. _

Draco has one arm wrapped around her waist; she clings to it, squeezing her eyes closed against the dizzying spin of passing trees. This power does not feel like her own. It’s too strong, too hot—nothing like her soft, glistening magic. There is no end to it. The well beneath her sternum stretches down, deep, deep within her, reaching for the centre of the earth, prepared to drag her down with it through every burning, crystalline layer.

She tries to tell him to ride faster, that her control is waning, but a howl rips through the consummate shadows of the forest. The horse rears, there’s nothing but dark fur and gnashing teeth, she’s flying, Draco’s grip on her waist disappears and she falls, smashing to earth, wet leaves in her mouth and mud in her eyes, she’s blind, barking and snarling presses in from every angle and she’s deaf, teeth rattling, skull shuddering from the impact. 

_ Draco, Draco. _

She feels him close by, panting, swinging his sword; a wet thump and a high whimper breach the ringing in her ears but his scream eclipses all, piercing her through the middle, made all the more horrible for the fact she never dreamed he could make such a sound, so laced with agony her heart stings. She staggers blindly to her feet, wiping the mud from her eyes.

Flashes of white, smears of black and dark grey in a terrible painter’s palette, colours bleeding into one another—where is Draco? She can’t see him clearly. Magic surges forth from the neverending pit in her chest and she aims recklessly, casting out her arms, power ripping, tearing, wrenched from her and spilt into the world, searing her fingertips on the way out. 

_ Please.  _ Is anyone listening? She prays she doesn’t strike him as the magic rolls from her in waves, culminating in a blazing flare of light which banishes every tiny scrap of darkness, illuminating Draco, sprawled on the forest floor, a dead wolf before him, the other’s tail disappearing as it lopes through the trees and away, whining and disfavouring one leg. 

Hermione drops to her knees, fingers fluttering over his sweat-soaked skin. “Draco? Draco, speak to me. Please, please be alright.”

His eyes crack open and he struggles into a sitting position, hissing, clutching at his forearm. Relief crashes through her, curling her forwards against his chest where she stays, trembling until she can bring herself to move again. Gods, this pain in her chest is unbearable. She refuses to think of the heights the pain would rise to if she were ever to lose him; that thought is expelled to the very back of her mind, tucked far beneath everything else she keeps locked away.

Draco pulls blood-sticky fabric away from his arm, revealing a ragged circle of teeth marks oozing red and yellow onto the pine needles. In the centre of it, she can make out the faint line of their blood pact, smeared with blood though it is. His head falls back, chest heaving, cords straining in his neck, his jaw twitching as he grinds his molars together. He prods at the wound with shaking fingers and a gasped groan is wrenched from his lips.

“Let me.” She takes his wrist and draws his arm into her lap; this close, the bite looks even more grievous, darkening unnaturally at the edges.

Daylight reigns and the moon is a sliver but those wolves were far too big and far too sentient to be anything other than the beasts of fairytale legend, told to her as a little girl to keep her abed at night instead of roaming the forest glades after sundown. Her fingers glide over the wound, leaking magic, the skin knits itself together, but the heaviness inside her doesn’t disappear with the blood and gore. It stays—stubborn as a boulder—in the pit of her stomach long after Draco’s arm is once again smooth.

“The scar is gone,” he murmurs, running his thumb over the flawless stretch of skin.

So it is. She can’t remember wielding this much power, even when her magic was at its height, before the litany of teas and sedatives. Looking within herself—examining the glistening treasure inside of her which is a kernel no longer but an endless ocean of gold—is like trying to fathom the height of the sky or the depth of the greatest ravine. Following her magic along its ceaseless length brings her deeper and deeper, plunging into the dark, there must be an end but there is not, just a small fissure, leading… out.

Her eyes flutter open and are drawn, inexorably, to the saddlebag, its contents scattered across the forest floor, including a cloth satchel, ripped open to reveal dark metal and blue gems that seem to leach the fading sunlight.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm quite happy to have finished my first "long-ish" fanfic. I would love to know your thoughts, comments, and constructive criticism for what I could do better in my next story!
> 
> As with the rest of this fic, this chapter had scenes heavily inspired by the fairytale art by Avendell. I hope you enjoy ^^

The wolf may come back. Hermione watches for it, turning in place, her heart aflutter and her limbs shaky, while Draco wrenches his sword from the other, dead wolf’s side. Night falls above the trees, casting long shadows wrought in the shape of wolves and monsters. She can’t tell where the world ends and her terror-fuelled visions begin; a patch of dark shifts and she whirls, incinerating a tree to a glowing, fragmented husk. 

Her chest heaves up and down like great bellows. The Horcrux watches all the while, cold eyes raking down her spine, calling to her with its sinister whispering and sensual tug, tug on her ribs, beckoning her closer, but she won’t go, she won’t. The wretched thing must be destroyed, somehow.

“I need to rest.” Draco wipes his blade clean on a spongy patch of grass and slides it into the leather loops, stiffly, each movement tentative and paired with a flash of teeth. Grimacing, he’s grimacing, she hasn’t healed all of his injuries. “For a little while, before we make for the castle again.”

The horse has fled, leaving deep hoofprints between the blood-soaked leaves and strewn contents of the saddlebags; she and Draco are utterly alone, and weakened—how will they stand even the barest chance of rescuing his parents?

She can’t draw a full lungful of air, the breath lodges in her throat and stutters, choking her until she puffs out a shallow exhale and begins again, cyclical, in and out until she’s seeing stars.  _ Calm yourself. Breathe.  _ Air shudders at the back of her throat on the precipice of a sob, but she has survived Lord Voldemort’s court, she has survived drowning, and Bellatrix, and fleeing in the freezing cold, and a werewolf attack; she will survive again. She will survive this.

A thin bedroll lies unfurled, its leather buckles torn to scraps by long claws. Hermione crouches beside it and fashions a nest-like bed with what she can find, breathing deeply through her nose. Survive. They need rest, and food.

Draco approaches, laying a hand on her arm. Even through the thick material of his cloak—still draped around her shoulders—she can feel the warmth of his palm, firm and steady and real. She can’t look at him just yet. Her eyes prickle and her throat burns; seeing his soft, tired eyes would snap something inside of her, and she needs to be strong, she needs to breathe, to survive, survive, survive.

She waits until her fluttering pulse has slowed to a steady beat before turning and embracing him; his breastplate is cold and wet under her cheek, flecked with his blood and the wolf’s, coppery and sharp, shot through with the heady scent of meadowsweet. Draco unclasps his armour, lets it fall away, and clumps of the frothy blooms spill out, wrinkled and drooping, onto the forest floor. 

She picks up a sprig and twirls it between her fingers, releasing the scent; floral and earthy and unmistakably Draco, carrying her through the passages of her memory past every brush of shoulders and lingering touch. 

“Does every Death Eater do this?” The smell clings to her. It’s difficult to imagine trained knights stuffing their armour with flowers; the thought drags mirth up through her throat and she has to fight the absurd urge to laugh.

Draco’s pained wince as he lowers himself onto the bedroll quickly sobers her. She sits beside him, laying her hands on his chest, feeling the rumble of his voice as he speaks. “Most don’t bother. I learnt this from my father.”

“You must be very close.” She keeps her eyes on his torso, sending tendrils of magic to twine between his ribs, healing and easing in its curiously sentient way, like a slithering golden serpent. Her gaze flickers up to find him pensive, his eyes closed off and distant.

His only response is to take her hands and pull her to lie beside him.

Knee to knee, nose to nose, they lie under the star-flecked canopy, staring into one another’s eyes without speaking. The sweetest sorrow fills her chest as she runs her fingers over his cheek and through his hair, trailing her fingernails against his scalp until his eyes drift closed. His arm is propped under his cheek, healed and smooth and immaculate, but who is to say what illness lurks beneath, ready to claw its way free at the full moon’s next rise?

She shifts closer, twining her arms around his neck and pressing her face into the crook of his shoulder, breathing in the warm, damp scent of his skin, feeling the rough scratch of his shirt. His pulse beats evenly under her cheek and his breaths are slow and deep, stealing a moment of sleep just as she steals this moment.

Silence presses in all sides but it is deceptive; the forest is rife with danger, teeming in the darkness at the edges of their halo of softness and peace. Her magic shimmers around them in a diaphanous cloud, his breaths puff against her skin and, for a little while, they are safe.

She needn’t worry about the full moon. The thought comes unbidden, worming cold, grey fronds into her warm sleepiness. Her eyes snap open. She needn’t worry about the full moon, for they will not live to see it wax. This is the last snatch of peace they will ever know.

It only makes her hold him closer.

Her grim prophecy proves true when midnight limns the trees in murky, mournful grey. The earth shakes beneath their heads, hauling them to wakefulness then to their feet, back to back, watching the gaps in the trees.

“He’s sent Death Eaters.” Draco draws his sword with the soft swish of leather against steel, leaving the sheath-loops and his armour on the ground. “When they break the tree line, you will need to run. Run towards them, they won’t be able to turn quickly enough, and make sure—”

“I’m not leaving you.” Her stomach congeals into a hard lump, making it difficult to speak. Does he really think she will run and leave him to his fate without a backwards glance? Hauling on his shoulder until he turns, she seizes his jaw when he tries to look away. “Until the last,” she says thickly, staring up into his eyes. “Until the last, do you hear me?”

The distant rumbling is louder, morphing into distinct, individual hoofbeats against the hard earth. Beat, beat, beat; a monstrous heart, a war drum.

Draco brushes the hair from her face and presses a slow, tender kiss to her forehead, lingering until she can smell the horses and hear their huffing, grunting breaths from the darkness of the forest.

Warmth blooms from his touch but she breaks away, pushing him behind her. “Don your armour.”

He will need it.

His last strap clicks into place just as the first black-plated knight explodes from the brambles, thundering towards them, sword raised, deathly intent clear in every emotionless line and edge of his brutal armour. His horse makes it all of two strides into the clearing before Hermione punches her hand in its direction and both horse and rider spin through the air, flailing, terrified equine screams piercing her ears above the steady throb of her magic. A pang shoots through her at the heavy thud and crack of the horse against the ground, its shriek withering then falling silent, but this is war, and she will fight until her last breath.

The forest is alive with movement, weaponry and glossy armour shining between every bough and bush. Air tickles the back of her throat as she breathes, in and out, a path of sweat pricking along her back and in the seams of her hands. Behind her, Draco tenses, knees bent and sword raised in the corner of her eye.

The fallen Death Eater strains free from under his dead horse and staggers to his feet. She expects him—any of them—to speak, to make demands of her and Draco or strut like roosters, boastful of the impending executions, but all is silent.

Then they converge.

There is no emotion, no feeling, her every thought and action narrows with needlepoint precision to the swarm of Death Eaters pressing in from every corner, at least a dozen of them, transforming the forest into an onyx panorama. Power lashes through her arms and slams into black metal armour, denting it, sending black beetle knights onto their backs where they lie dazed and gasping. 

The thread connecting her to Draco has never flared as bright—a scarlet river intertwining their moving, dancing bodies—as it does now. She clenches the thread bridging her to him with one hand while the other dips again and again into the well stretching deep beneath her sternum, hurling glittering waves of magic at the Death Eaters until finally, finally, her fingertips scrape the bottom. It aches down to the very centre of her being but she cannot stop, not when Draco is fighting two Death Eaters at once, blocking and parrying but slowing, she sees it in the droop of his shoulders. His hair is streaked with blood—he wears no helmet. Where is his helmet?

Across the clearing, scattered there by their fleeing horse. Too far, too far, she is waning, as is Draco, and still, there are more of them, suits of gleaming armour streaming from the trees, swallowing the weak moonlight with their jet-black pauldrons and tassets.

A blazing heat spreads from her shoulder and she stumbles, crying out, hand flying there to find hot blood streaming from a thin gash. It’s not deep, she can still move her arm, but the unstoppable power in her breast is now little more than a dribbling creek bed in the height of summer.

“No!” comes a shout from across the clearing. At first, she thinks it is Draco, but a Death Eater cuts his hand sharply downwards and the other one backs away, his sword falling. A streak of crimson drips from the tip of his blade— _ my blood;  _ she grips the wound tighter, staunching it. “The Dark Lord wants her alive. Kill the traitor!”

_ Draco cannot win.  _ The whisper twines sinuously through the coils of her mind.  _ Only you can save him.  _ Ice drips down the back of her neck, twisting her face to the side, her eyes alighting on the ripped satchel. At the edge of her vision, Draco moves as though through water, slow and staggering, his sword a bright flash of silver before it is concealed by the press of armoured bodies surrounding him.

_ Come to me come to me come to me.  _ She follows the tug on her breastbone, walking on numb feet. The diadem is frigid against her hands. Dark power pulsates from the metal like a cold heartbeat, filling the gulf inside of her with gushing, roiling strength, then yanking it away as soon as she brushes against it.  _ Come to me come to me come to me.  _ Ice burns her fingertips but she cannot let it go, her skin is fused, and Draco is—Draco is dying.

The red thread stretches, taut and quivering, poised to snap. 

Thin wailing reverberates in her lungs, rising and rising until she is glowing with white-hot fever.

She lifts the diadem and sets it on her head.

Silver mist. Dim light between trembling, vein-like branches. Breath on her face; the wind, but she cannot smell it.

She is outside of her own body, floating, caught like a scrap of fabric in the trees, looking down at the cold, cruel smile twisting her lips. The words that stream from her mouth belong to someone else, her voice soft and sibilant and barely recognisable.

“I gave you a task, Draco. You have failed me.”

Draco kneels at the centre of a ring of black knights, a sword jutting from his back like a sad and broken wing. 

Her heart does not falter, her lungs do not spasm, she stands tall and serene as a statue cut from marble, the diadem sitting cold and proud across her brow, sapphire glowing from within—a fierce, wicked light. The part of her which hovers above as a breath of insubstantial mist can only watch herself stalk closer and kneel before Draco, lifting his chin with hard fingers.

“I had such high hopes for you,” she hisses, nails biting into his jaw. “What a waste.” 

He falls hard against the ground as she thrusts him harshly away, standing in a liquid, graceful movement and turning her back.

His eyes are glazed and smoky, staring up at the canopy and the muted stars peeking through. “Hermione,” he gasps, frothy blood leaking from the corners of his mouth.

She floats above him, ghostly hands cupping his face. He cannot see her, she is not real, she knows this, but it is as though he is looking right at her.

The red thread falters—she feels it, distantly, pulling her towards her body, frayed to a bare sliver.

“Hermione…” Draco turns his head and reaches for her retreating back, fingers clawing at the soil. His breath rattles in and catches, choking on her name, spluttering out bright specks of blood which stains his lips and chin like brackish, fetid wine.

Fraying, fraying, their connection is wavering, his eyes drift closed, her body strides away into the forest, the diadem’s sapphire a bobbing blue will-o’-the-wisp; she follows, gliding through the trees like smoke. She has no ears but there is a dull roaring, surf breaking against a pebbled beach, she seizes the thread and pulls, pulls, sucking in a gasp as the two parts of her collide in a cosmic burst.

Icy hands around her throat, squeezing, parasitically sucking her life force; Lord Voldemort’s savagely handsome face is a glaucescent blur like she sees it through a fragile, gauzy fabric, straining towards her, his eyes bleeding red and morphing into reptilian slits beneath the diadem’s dark band. Shadows on great and terrible wings swoop in to smother her; she falters, the thread strains, she knows Draco will die if it breaks and she will die with him.

“You belong to me.” The words twist around her in a pearly, insidious spiral; Lord Voldemort’s lips do not move, frozen in a hazy sneer. “Your parents traded you like chattel and I paid the price. I own you.”

Magma brims in her throat, her eyes, her hands.  _ I belong to no one. I will destroy you, and your castle, and everything you have ever touched.  _ These words seethe in her mouth but the rage she feels is wordless, without grace or splendour or even righteous fury. There is only the fire.

She lets it consume her, raking her nails down that hated face, snatching the diadem from her own head and pitching it as far as her strength allows. 

The sharp sting of ozone. A final, wavering shriek. Blood in her veins, air in her lungs, fire in her soul.

Her breath burns. She’s running. Her body is her own again, and she pushes it to the brink, breaking into the clearing at a sprint, starlight flickering over the trees and the black armour and she realises it’s emanating from her skin, echoes of Horcrux-power glowing inside of her, hot coals waiting for a bellow blast.

She scorches the Death Eaters into nothing. It barely takes a thought. Fluffy ash spirals in a perverse snow flurry, settling on Draco’s greying skin, melting into the blood.

There’s so much blood. She drops to her knees, pressing her ear to his lips, hands fisting in the fallen leaves and twigs as though the pain of it will ground her when she wants to simply float away into the night sky. She tries to swallow but her throat is tight, as stuffed full of cotton wool as her stomach.

He cannot be dead. If he were dead, she would be, too. She scrabbles for the bridge between them, wading through the ever-shifting, blinding light until she finds the remnants of it hanging on by a bare sinew.

_ Stay, stay, please don’t leave me.  _ She drags her way up the thread, staining it gold behind her, and pours everything into that tiny, flickering connection, lips pressed to his, breathing life— _ her  _ life—into him.

He doesn’t stir, she sits back on her haunches and stares down at him but he doesn’t stir, his face is as still and pale as a corpse, the blood made so much brighter for it. The sword protrudes hideously from a gap in his armour; she pulls it free and flings it into the bushes where it shatters into a thousand glittering pieces, shredding through leaves and bark and her own skin but she cannot feel it, cannot feel anything happening to her body when inside, she is screaming. An endless, tearing scream, pulling her fragile resolve in on itself until she crumples, face buried in the crook of his neck.

Tears elude her, as do the sobs she wishes would wrack her chest; anything but this silent screaming burning her up inside.

The golden link strains between them, taunting her. This is the moment it fades forever, leaving a gaping hole in her chest, she knows it, but the severance does not come. The thread only glows brighter, lacing between them in a delicate needlework pattern, binding, sealing, locking; a hefty click rattles through her ribcage.

Draco’s hand settles on her back. “Hermione.” His voice is a croak but he is alive, eyes open, colour flooding back into his cheeks.

The tears come as she gathers him to her breast, rocking back and forth, cradling his head—heaving sobs, wrenched from deep in her belly.  _ Alive, alive, _ she can’t speak, only hold him.

His arms are tight around her waist, face pressed close over her heart. The moon passes overhead and turns the world soft and milky, that is how long they sit wrapped in one another’s arms.

She could stay like this forever; let the forest grow around them, mossy statues eternally entwined in this still and quiet clearing where they will never be found. Her heart is full, tears streaming down her cheeks, turned cold where a chill wind grazes her skin.

“I thought that I lost you,” he says, pulling himself up so they are at eye level, holding her face in his hands; she can see where tears have cut pale streaks through the dirt and blood on his face. His eyes flick between hers, bright and silver—he is alive, speaking with her, sitting up, and she is dizzy with longing.

She places her hands over his, closing her eyes to soak in the feel of his warm fingers against her cheeks. “I’m here. We’re safe.”

They rise together, staggering, Draco cradling his middle, her supporting him with an arm around his waist; they stand in silence and breathe in the chilly air which stinks of blood, of burning, of lingering decay wafting from the turned earth like fungus spores detached and released.

“You’re hurt.” His thumb brushes over the bloodstain on her sleeve; it’s turning brown, crusting to her skin.

The crease between his brows, the lines around his mouth, they make her heart ache. She grips his hand as though the tight squeeze of her fingers will reassure him of her strength. “A scratch, nothing more.”

His lips part, eyes flashing, but a high whinny shivers from the forest and he turns away, shielding her with his body. 

Of course, there are more. She squashes the whimper rising in her chest, clotting her emotion. Everything—her spasming lungs, her watery stomach—trembles with the effort.

She is empty, her skin dull and lifeless, her magic weak and distant and so far out of reach, she doubts she will ever make use of it again. The hoofbeats merge with her rumbling pulse, beating at such a tempo the forest seems to rise and rise, curving overhead, a cathedral of wood and vine.

Horses trumpet at the edge of the clearing, cantering, circling them. She heaves Draco’s sword from the ground and holds it uselessly at hip height, muscles burning, arms straining, but she will swing it with every last scrap of strength possessed to her or perish in the attempt. The golden thread twitches with her spiking pulse, wrapped inside of her like a thin and vital chain.

A bowstring creaks taut; she whirls to find herself staring down the length of an arrow shaft to a man with a face like stone, marked with a livid scar stretching across his forehead in silver lightning tendrils. The other rider has a shock of fire-kissed hair, wielding a wickedly gleaming blade.

“Who are you?” She fights to keep the tremor from her voice, raising the sword a little higher.

“It’s them.” The man lowers his bow. “The ones from the letter.”

Letter? Her palms grow slick with sweat; she readjusts her hold on the sword. “What letter do you speak of?” 

The man with hair like fire dismounts and makes for them; Hermione steps in his path, her stomach in knots, breaths coming quick and fast through her nose. She feels Draco’s fear as though it is her own, the link between them pulling her heart into her throat.

The man flips his sword to his other hand—a skilled swordsman, or incredibly arrogant—but she is willing to kill with her nails and teeth. Feral, ferocious, her hard edges bristling and snapping beneath the confines of her skin.

Something shines in the depths of his eyes; a hint of keenness, of understanding, for he sheathes his blade and steps closer, palms raised.

She can hear Draco breathing shallowly behind her, air catching in his throat and hiccoughing out in small grunts of pain. His voice is low, lips near her ear. “Look at the emblem.”

A bird, wings outstretched to catapult it from a pit of flames, gleams on their chests, picked out in amber thread. The sword falls to her side and her arms go slack, oddly buoyant without the dread weight. Draco’s fingers cuff around her wrist, sliding down until their palms are pressed, fingers entwined.

“We’re with the Order of the Phoenix.” The man with the lightning scar slides from his horse. The crunch of his boots is distant, as from the depths of a cavern when she stands at the entrance, staring into the great unknown stretching before her across endless rolling hills and verdant foliage. “I believe we may be able to help one another.”

**FIN**


End file.
